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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75826 ***
+
+
+GIFTS OF FORTUNE
+
+
+
+
+_Other Books by the Same Author_
+
+
+  THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE
+  OLD JUNK
+  LONDON RIVER
+  WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT
+  TIDEMARKS
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _The tall ship--standing out into windy space_--
+]
+
+
+
+
+  GIFTS OF FORTUNE
+
+  AND HINTS FOR THOSE
+  ABOUT TO TRAVEL
+
+  BY
+
+  H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+  _With Woodcuts by_
+  HARRY CIMINO
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+              “_Giftës of fortune,
+  That passen as a shadow on the wall._”
+
+  CHAUCER, The Merchant’s Tale.
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+  MCMXXVI
+
+
+
+
+  GIFTS OF FORTUNE
+
+  Copyright, 1926, by
+  Harper & Brothers
+  Printed in U. S. A.
+
+  _First Edition_
+
+  H-A
+
+
+
+
+  _To
+  The Caliph and his Lady
+  for placing the unripened pages
+  of this book in the sun
+  of the Côte d’Or
+  at their
+  Chateau de Missery_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  SOME HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL      1
+
+  OUT OF TOUCH                            100
+
+  ELYSIUM                                 110
+
+  THE RAJAH                               116
+
+  THE STORM PETREL                        123
+
+  ON THE CHESIL BANK                      131
+
+  THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST                  186
+
+  DROUGHT                                 194
+
+  A RIDE ON A COMET                       200
+
+  REGENT’S PARK                           206
+
+  A DEVON ESTUARY                         212
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  THE TALL SHIP--STANDING OUT INTO
+  WINDY SPACE                                      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                    _Facing Page_
+  TO SEE THE GLOW OF SUNRISE ABOVE THE PALISADE
+  OF THE JUNGLE                                                 8
+
+  I MET A CHEERFUL GOATHERD                                    56
+
+  AFTER A LONG AND FAITHFUL ADHERENCE TO
+  THE BEATEN TRACKS YOU REACH SOME DISTANT
+  COASTAL OUTPOST                                              74
+
+  SOME NAME IT EDEN OR ELYSIUM                                 84
+
+  THE BUFFALOES STARED AT US AS WE WENT
+  ALONG, AS MOTIONLESS AS FIGURES IN METAL                    120
+
+  AS TO THE SEA, IT HAS NO HUMAN ATTRIBUTES
+  WHATEVER                                                    158
+
+  AT LOW TIDE THESE STONE STAIRS GO DOWN TO
+  A SHINGLE BEACH                                             226
+
+
+
+
+GIFTS OF FORTUNE
+
+
+
+
+I. SOME HINTS FOR THOSE ABOUT TO TRAVEL
+
+
+I
+
+A year or two ago a lively book was published called _The Happy
+Traveller_. It is not an indispensable work if you have booked your
+passage, or are on a ship’s articles, for only Providence can help you
+then, yet it is a cheerful guide if you would know what long journeys
+are like, in parts, without making them. Its author, the Rev. Frank
+Tatchell, proves he has seen enough of the world to satisfy a crew
+of able seamen. He has seen it from the byroads, the highroads, the
+decks of local trading ships, and the windows of third-class railway
+carriages. He has seen it because, apparently, he wanted to; and he
+has enjoyed it all, or most of it. He has some heroic advice for those
+whom he judges may be infected by his own enthusiasm, and indeed his
+book would induce many young men to pull on their boots forthwith:
+“Be cheerful and interested in everything,” he tells us; and, “Do not
+bother too much about your inside.”
+
+But what I sought in his volume was not the Malay for Thank you--which
+he gave me--but what set him going. Why did he do it? There is a
+word, frequently seen in glossy narrative, “Wanderlust.” The very
+lemmings must know it. It excuses almost anything in the way of
+travel lunacy, even to herding with Russian emigrants for fun. It
+is used as a flourish by those who hope we will fail to notice that
+they are uncertain what to do with themselves. Mr. Tatchell, however,
+does not use it once. Yet you see him hustling through the bazaar at
+Bhamo, where you do not meet many tourists; and he discovers that the
+half-castes of the Society Isles are especially charming, though he
+does not pretend that it is worth while voyaging to the South Seas to
+confirm that; or he peeps into the Malayan forest long enough to note
+“myriads of leeches in all directions humping and hastening towards the
+traveller.” He certainly saw those leeches. He saw them _hump_. But
+why did he foregather with them, and go to smell Bhamo? For out of so
+varied an experience he returns but to assure romantic youth sitting
+on the bollards of our quays and gazing seaward wistfully, “Elephants
+dislike having white men approach them from behind.” Or of this: “If
+you should become infested with fleas, sleep out on a bed of bracken
+one night, and in the morning you will be free from the pests.”
+Such fruits of travel seem hardly enough. Mr. Tatchell himself was
+decidedly a happy traveller, and the cause of happiness in others--his
+book can be commended in confidence--for he admits that his method of
+enjoying himself in a strange bed is to sing aloud the aria, “Why do
+the Nations?” But he does not tell us what sent him roving, nor does
+he produce any collection of treasures, except oddities such as the
+warning to white men about approaching the behinds of elephants, and
+Vinakka vinnakka! (Fijian for Bravo.)
+
+Perhaps those little curiosities are enough. We are pleased to hear
+of them. What else was there to get? It would be very hard for most
+voyagers to explain convincingly why they became restless, and went to
+sea. Some do it to get away from us, some to get away from themselves,
+and some because they cannot help it. I shall not forget the silliness
+which gave me my first sight of Africa. The office telephone rang.
+“Oh, is that you? Well, we want you to go to Algeria at once.” I went
+downstairs hurriedly to disperse this absurdity. But it was no good. I
+had to go. And because I was argumentative about it they added Tripoli
+and Sicily, which served me right. After all, while in Africa, one is
+necessarily absent from Fleet Street. I should have remembered that.
+
+Mr. Tatchell tells us that even a poor man, if he does not leave it
+till he is in bondage to the income-tax collector or the Poor Law
+officials, may see all the world. I suppose he may. With sufficient
+health, enterprise, and impudence, a young fellow could inveigle
+himself overseas without paying a lot of money to the P. & O. Company;
+though it wants some doing nowadays, under the present rules of the
+Mercantile Marine Board and the seafarers’ unions. Shipowners do not
+lightly engage to pay compensation for accidents to inexperienced hands
+whose sole recommendation is that they want to see the world so wide.
+As for getting a berth for the voyage cheaply, it would be foolish to
+suppose that agents for passenger ships are willing to forgive the fact
+that you are poor, and will shake Cornucopia about freely. Why should
+they? You have to pay across the counter in exchange for a ticket, and
+at the post-war rates. If anyone doubts that this is a hard world, let
+him cut the painter at Port Said, with a shilling in his pocket, and
+note what will happen. In some difficult regions you must travel on
+foot with the natives, and live with them; and that costs very little,
+even in a land otherwise expensive, but those unsophisticated coasts
+must first be reached. That simple way of a nomad is all very well in
+the wilderness, but I think any reasonable man, however thirsty he may
+be for a draught of primitive Life, would hesitate before sequestering
+himself in native cities like Calcutta and Singapore, counting cannily
+the lesser coins, and traveling about in third-class carriages. I
+noticed that even Mr. Tatchell shrank from the prospect of getting
+from island to island of Indonesia with the deck passengers. I am not
+surprised. One is easily satisfied with an occasional hour on the lower
+deck, in converse with a picturesque native elder. But to eat and sleep
+there for weeks, among the crowing cocks, the banana skins, the babies,
+the dried fish, and men and women spitting red stuff after chewing
+betel nut! It has been done, I believe, but the shipping companies and
+all their officers set their faces against it. They do not encourage
+Europeans to travel even second class in those seas, though there is
+hardly any difference between the cabins of the two classes. Of course,
+if one were anything of an Orientalist, it would be ridiculous to keep
+to the first saloon with the Europeans when there were Arab and Chinese
+merchants in an inferior saloon of the ship.
+
+I do not know how one plans a long voyage, and maintains the excellent
+plan scientifically through all its difficulties. I have never done any
+planning. A ship seems to have drifted my way at last by chance, and
+then, if I did not hesitate too long about it, I went in her, though
+always for a reason very inadequate. One bitter and northerly Easter I
+read, because gardening was impossible, Bates’ “Naturalist on the River
+Amazons.” The famous illustration of that spectacled entomologist in
+trousers and a check shirt, standing with an insect net in a tropical
+forest surrounded by infuriated toucans, fixed me when casually I
+pulled the volume off a library shelf. The book had not been specially
+commended to me, but its effect was instant. And the picture that
+artful naturalist drew of the pleasures of Santa Belem de Para, when
+contrasted with the sleet of an English spring, made me pensive over a
+fire. I had never seen the tropics. And what a name it is, the Amazons!
+And what a delightful book is Bates’!
+
+Yet when I enquired into this enticement, Para might as well have been
+in another star. One may go cheaply to Canada, and risk it. That trick
+cannot be played on the tropics with impunity. I had the propriety to
+guess that. Then, one night, a sailor came home from sea, and just
+before he left he spoke of his next voyage. They were going to Para,
+and up the Amazon; and up a tributary of that river never before
+navigated by an ocean-going steamer. “Nonsense,” I said, “it cannot be
+done--not if you draw, as you say you do, nearly twenty-four feet. And
+it means rising about six hundred feet above sea level.”
+
+“You can talk,” the sailor replied, “but I’ve seen the charter. We’re
+going, and I wish we weren’t. Sure to be fevers. Besides, a ship has no
+right inside a continent.”
+
+I began thinking of Bates. My friend turned up the collar of his coat
+before going into the rain. “Look here,” he said, “if you have any
+doubt about it, you may take the trip. There’s a cabin we don’t use.”
+
+I never gave that preposterous suggestion a second thought, but I did
+write, for a lively morning newspaper, my sailor’s mocking summary
+of what that strange voyage might have in store. The editor, a day
+later, met me on the office stairs. “That was an amusing lie of yours
+this morning,” he said. I answered him that it was written solely
+in the cause of science and navigation. What was more, I assured
+him earnestly, I had been offered a berth on the ship for the proof
+of doubters. “Well,” said the editor, “you shall go and prove it.”
+He meant that. I could see by the challenging look in his eye that
+nothing much was left about which to argue. He prided himself on his
+swift and unreasonable decisions.
+
+Somehow, as that editor descended the stairs, showing me the finality
+of his back, the attractive old naturalist of the Amazon with his palms
+at Para, toucans, spectacles, butterflies, and everlasting afternoon of
+tranquillity in the forest of the tropics, was the less alluring. This
+meant packing up; and for what? Even the master of the steamer could
+not tell me that.
+
+It is better to obey the mysterious index, without any fuss, when it
+points a new road, however strange that road may be. There is probably
+as much reason for it, if the truth were known, as for anything else.
+It would be absurd, in the manner of Browning and Mr. Tatchell,
+to greet the unseen with a cheer, and thus flatter it, yet when
+circumstances begin to look as though they intend something different
+for us, perhaps the proper thing to do is to get into accord with them,
+to see what will happen.
+
+There was no doubt about that voyage, either. I take this opportunity
+to thank an autocratic editor for his cruel decision one morning on
+the office stairs, a trivial episode he has completely forgotten. It
+is worth the break, and the discomfort of a winter dock, and the
+drive out in the face of hard westerly weather, to come up a ship’s
+companion one morning, and to see for the first time the glow of
+sunrise above the palisade of the jungle. You never forget the warm
+smell of it, and its light; though that simple wonder might not be
+thought worth a hard fight with gales in the western ocean. Yet later,
+when by every reasonable estimate of a visitor accustomed to the
+assumption of man’s control of nature the forest should have ended, yet
+continues as though it were eternal--savage, flamboyant, yet silent and
+desolate--the voyager begins to feel vaguely uneasy. He cannot meet
+that lofty and sombre regard with the cheerful curiosity of the early
+part of the voyage. He feels lost. St. Paul’s cathedral does not seem
+so influential as once it did, nor man so important. And perhaps it
+is not an unhealthful surmise either that man may be only a slightly
+disturbing episode on earth after all, and had better look out; a
+hindering and humbling notion of that sort would have done him no harm,
+if of late years it had given him pause.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _To see the glow of sunrise above the palisade of
+  the jungle._
+]
+
+Well, something of that sort is about as much as one should expect to
+get out of the experience, that and the ability to call for a porter in
+Fijian or Chinese. But is it not sufficient? It is hardly as tangible
+as hearing earlier than the people at home of the wealth of oil at
+Balik-papan, or what comes of getting in at the Rand on the ground
+floor. Even as book material it is not so sparkling as Lady Hester
+Stanhope, or as exciting as sword-fish angling off the Bermudas. Nor
+does it provide any inspiration, once you are home again, to get to
+work to plant the British flag where it will do the lucky ones most
+good. There seems hardly anything in it, and yet you feel that you
+could not have done any better, and are not sorry it turned out just so.
+
+Besides, there were the men one met. It would not be easy to analyse
+the impulse which sent one travelling, an impulse strong enough, if
+vague, to overcome one’s natural desire to be let alone. What did
+one want, or expect to learn? It would be hard to say. But you are
+aware, in rare moments, that you have got something almost as good
+as a word about a new oil-field, through some chance converse with a
+stranger, about nothing in particular. For it might have been night in
+the Malacca Strait, with little to give reasonable conviction of the
+realities except the stars, the tremor of the ship’s rail, and the glow
+of a shipmate’s cigar; and the other man might not have said much. You
+had previously noticed he was not that kind. But his casual relation
+of an obscure adventure--rather as if the droning of the waters had
+become a significant utterance--gave an abiding content to the shadows.
+
+
+II
+
+What right have we to travel, when better men have to stay at home? But
+it would be unwise to attempt an answer to that question, for certainly
+it would lead, as did the uncorking of the bottle that imprisoned the
+Genie, to much smoke and confusion. We should not poke about with a
+naked light amid the props which uphold the august and many-storied
+edifice of society, even to make sure of our rightful place there. It
+was a reading of Lord Bryce’s _Memories of Travel_ that started so odd
+a doubt in my mind. When I had finished it I did not begin to think
+of packing a bag. I felt instead that I had no title to do that. Lord
+Bryce, that learned man, had been remembering casually Iceland and
+the tropics, Poland, the Mountains of Moab, and the scenery of North
+America. But he did not make me feel that those places should be mine.
+He, that great scholar, made them desirable, yet infinitely remote,
+and reservations for wiser men, among whom, if I were bold enough to
+intrude, my inconsequence would be detected instantly. After reading
+his book of travel I felt that it would be as wrong in me to possess
+and privily to treasure priceless Oriental manuscripts as to claim the
+right to see coral atolls in the Pacific or prospects of the Altai.
+
+We may lack the warrant to travel, even if we have the means. Lord
+Bryce made it coldly clear that few of us are competent to venture
+abroad. He made me feel that much that would come my way would be
+wasted on me, for I have little in common with the encyclopædias. The
+wonders would loom ahead, would draw abeam, would pass astern, and I
+should not see them; they would not be there. The pleasures of travel,
+when we are candid about them, are separated by very wide deserts and
+tedious, where there is nothing but sand and the dreary howling of
+wild dogs. An Eastern city may grow stale in a night. “‘Dear City of
+Cecrops’ saith the poet; but shall we not say, ‘Dear City of Zeus?’”
+There are days when the ocean is a pond. Its relative importance then
+appears to be that of a newspaper of last week. Sometimes, too, you
+do not want to hear that there are three miles of water under you; no
+less. What of it? In nasty weather the end so far below you of the last
+two miles is of less importance than the beginning of the first.
+
+It may also happen that when at last your ship reaches that far place
+whose name is as troubling as the name of the star to which you look
+in solitude, that--what is it you do there? You gaze overside at it
+from your trite anchorage, unbelievingly. The first mate comes aft,
+leisurely, rubbing his hands. You do not go ashore. What has become of
+the magic of a name? You go below with the mate, who has finished his
+job, for a pipe. To-morrow will do for Paradise, or the day after. One
+morning I reached Naples by sea, and I well remember my first sight
+of it. The stories I had heard of that wonderful bay! The ecstatic
+letters in my pocket from those who were instructing me how nothing of
+my luck should be missed! But it was raining. It was cold. I had been
+travelling for an age. There was hardly any bay, and what I could see
+of it was as glum as a bad mistake. There was a wet quay, some house
+fronts that were house-fronts, and a few cabs. I took a cab. That was
+better than walking to the railway station, and quicker. It is quite
+easy for me to describe my first sight of Naples and its bay.
+
+But Lord Bryce was not an incompetent traveller. He could see through
+any amount of rain and dirt. He was competent indeed; fully, lightly,
+and with grace. To other tourists he may have appeared to be one of the
+crowd, trying hard to get some enjoyment out of a lucky deal in rubber
+or real estate, and not knowing how to do it. But he was not bored. He
+was quiet merely because he knew what he was looking at. What to us
+would have been opaque he could see through; yet I doubt whether he
+would have said anything about it, unless he had been asked. And why
+should we ask a fellow-traveller whether he can see through what is
+opaque? We never do it, because our own intelligence tells us that what
+is dark cannot be light. What we do not see is not there.
+
+Yet how much we miss, when on a journey, Lord Bryce reveals. There
+was not often a language difficulty for him. When he looked at the
+wilderness of central Iceland he knew the cause of it, and could
+explain why tuffs and basalts make different landscapes. When he was in
+Hungary and Poland the problems we should have brushed aside as matters
+no Englishman ought to be expected to understand, became, in the light
+of his political and historical lore, simple and relevant. Among the
+islands of the South Seas, with their unsolved puzzles of an old
+continental land mass and of race migrations, so learned a traveller
+was just as much at ease. Once I remarked to an old voyager, who in
+some ways resembled Lord Bryce, that it was in my dreams to visit
+Celebes. “But,” he remarked coldly, “you are not an ethnologist.” No;
+and I can see now, after these _Memories of Travel_, that I have other
+defects as a traveller.
+
+Yet I cannot deny that a craving for knowledge, when abroad, may
+sometimes come over me, with a dim resemblance to the craving for food
+or sleep. But if I go to my note-books in later years and discover that
+though I had forgotten them I had many interesting facts stored away,
+nevertheless it is evident the valuable information does very well
+where it is. It will never be missed. Its importance has faded. There
+are other things, however, one never entered in a notebook, and never
+tried to remember, for they were of no seeming importance then or now,
+things seen for an instant only, or smelt, or heard in the distance,
+which are never forgotten. They will recur from the past, often
+irrelevantly, even when the memory is not turned that way, as though
+something in us knew better what to look for in life than our trained
+eyes.
+
+
+III
+
+Travel, we are often told, gives light to the mind. I have wondered
+whether it does. Consider the sailors. They are supposed to travel
+widely. They see the cities of the world, and the works of the Lord
+and His wonders in the deep. And--well, do you know any sailors? If you
+do, then you may have noticed that not infrequently their opinions seem
+hardly more valuable than yours and mine. Yet it must be said for them
+that they rarely claim an additional value for their opinions because
+they have anchored off Colombo. They know better than that. They know,
+very likely, that all the cities of the world can no more give us what
+was withheld at our birth than our unaided suburb. As much convincing
+folly may be heard at Penang as at Peckham. The sad truth is, one is
+as likely to grow wiser during a week-end at Brighton as in a “black
+Bilbao tramp
+
+    With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,
+    And a drunken Dago crew,
+    And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
+    From Cadiz, south on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.”
+
+The fascination and illusion of that Out Trail! The other day, a man, a
+wise and experienced traveller, who knows deep water better than most
+of us, who has hunted whales, and even enjoyed being out of soundings
+in literature, overheard a voice near us on a dock-head exclaim in
+delight at the sight of a ship outward bound: “I wish I were aboard
+her.” He said to me quietly, “I felt like that, too, but really, you
+know, I don’t want to be aboard. I’m a little bit afraid of the sea.”
+
+So am I. That is one thing, at least, I have learned in travel. I do
+not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in
+the very sound of it that stirs the apprehension we feel when we listen
+to noble music; we became inexplicably troubled. It is not the fear of
+mishap, though that may not be absent. It is more than that, for after
+all one is much safer in a good ship than when crossing the road at
+Charing Cross.
+
+It may be a surmise of one’s inconsequence in that immensity of sky and
+water. And our inconsequence has not been always obvious to us. The
+ministrations of a city nourish the pride of the social animal and yet
+make him a dependable creature. Turn him into the open and he shrinks
+from all that light. The dread problems that our energetic fellow-men
+create in the cities of the plain make us myopic through the intensity
+of our peering alarm. We become sure that even the empyrean must watch
+our activities with grave interest. Yet we may be deceived in that;
+for on blue water one cannot help noting that the sky does not appear
+to act with any regard for our interest, and the sea itself is so
+inscrutable, so vast, and moves with a rhythm that so diminishes one’s
+own scope and measure, that a voyager may imagine he is confronted by
+majesty, though an impersonal majesty, without ears or eyes or ruth.
+That is not comfortable to a sense of self-importance.
+
+Do we travel to learn such things? Of course not. The promise to
+diminish a feeling of self-importance in a traveller is not one of
+Messrs. Cook’s happy inducements. We do not travel for that. If we get
+it at all, we are welcome to it, without extra charge. You must pay
+more if you want to have a cabin to yourself. There are additional
+charges, too, if you would deviate from the schedule of your voyage.
+Should you put off at Penang for a week, and continue by the next
+ship, that fun must be paid for. Eager still for the end of the
+rainbow--which, so far on a long voyage, you have not reached, to
+your surprise and disappointment--you leave your ship at Barbadoes,
+consult the chart, and judge that what you really want is at Yucatan,
+at Surinam, at Trinidad, or some other place where you are not; and at
+a great expense of time and money you go. No use. There again you find
+that you have taken yourself with you. No rainbow’s end!
+
+I have often wondered what people see who travel round the world in a
+liner furnished with the borrowings of a city’s club-life and other
+occasions for idling; Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu, Yokohama,
+Hong-Kong, Batavia, and Rangoon, all those variations of scenery for
+the club windows; and so home again. What do they see? The anchorage
+of Sourabaya is no more revealing than that of Havre, if warmer: a
+mole, ships at rest, some straight miles of ferro-concrete quays in the
+distance, flat grey acres of the galvanised roofs of sheds, and a tower
+or two beyond. True, there are the clouds of the tropics to watch, and
+a Malay polishing the ship’s brass. Only the mate and the captain are
+at lunch, for the others have gone ashore. You may make what romance
+you can out of that.
+
+The others have gone ashore? All the great seaports I have seen have
+been very much alike; and these liners rarely stay at one long enough
+to make easy the discovery of a difference. You have no time to get
+lost. You arrive, and then an inexorable notice is chalked on the
+blackboard at the head of the ship’s gangway, to which a quartermaster
+draws your attention as you leave the ship. The old city is two
+miles away, and the ship sails in two hours. No chance, you see, to
+get comfortably mislaid and forgotten. Besides, you run off with a
+car-load of other passengers. Unless the car skids into a ditch the
+game is up.
+
+Well, after all, that grudging sense of disappointment comes of
+intemperance with fascinating place-names and illusions. We expect to
+have romance displayed for us, as though it were a greater Wembley,
+and it is not. Travellers who “dash” round the world, as the febrile
+interviewers tell us, who dash across the Sahara or the Atlantic, then
+get into other speedy engines and dash again, expectant of a full life
+and their money’s worth, might as well dash to Southend and back till
+they run over a dog; or dash their brains out, and thus fulfil their
+destiny. But I am not decrying travel, though sailors, I have been made
+painfully aware, are much amused by the expectations of those to whom
+a ship is an interlude of variegated enchantment between the serious
+affairs of life. I enjoy travel, and a little of it now and then is
+good for us, if we do not make demands which only lucky chance may
+fulfil.
+
+The best things in travel are all undesigned, and perhaps even
+undeserved. I had never seen a whale, for instance, and recently was
+watching the very waters of the Java Sea where one of them might have
+been good enough to reward me. Nothing like a whale appeared. Too late
+for that sort of thing, perhaps. This is the day of the submarine.
+Or perhaps I stared from the ship listlessly, and with no faith, not
+caring much whether there were whales and wonders in these days or not.
+Anyhow, my last chance went. On my way home, while just to the south
+of Finisterre, I came out of my cabin a little after sunrise merely
+to look at the weather (which was fine) and a tiny cloud, rounded
+and defined, was dispersing over the waves, less than a mile away.
+Shrapnelling? Then a number of those faint rounded clouds of vapour
+shaped intermittently. The ship was in the midst of a school of whales.
+There was a sigh--like the exhaust of a locomotive--and a body which
+seemed to rival the steamer in bulk appeared alongside; we barely
+missed that shadow of a submerged island. The officer of the watch told
+me afterwards that the ship’s stem nearly ran over it.
+
+That was a bare incident, however, and perhaps not worth counting.
+Yet all the significant things in travel come that way. Once in heavy
+weather I saw a derelict sailing ship; our steamer left its course to
+inspect her. But she was dead. There was no movement aboard her, except
+the loose door of a deckhouse. It flung open as we drew near, but
+nobody came out. The seas ran as they pleased about her deck fixtures.
+It was sunset, and just when we thought she had gone, for she had
+slipped over the summit of an upheaval, her skeleton appeared again in
+that waste, far astern, against the bleak western light. I felt in that
+moment that only then had the sea shown itself to me.
+
+It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The
+light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps the gods try us. They
+want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a
+bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find
+it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A
+casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to
+the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance
+at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you
+are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its
+harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a
+voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where
+Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.
+
+
+IV
+
+The reader of travellers’ tales is a cautious fellow, not easily
+fooled. He is never misled by facts which do not assort with his
+knowledge. But he does love wonders. His faith in dragons, dog-headed
+men, bearded women, and mermaids, is not what it used to be, but
+he will accept good substitutes. The market is still open to the
+ingenious. Any lady who is careful to advise her return from the
+sheikhs is sure to have the interviewers surprise her at the dock-side.
+She need only come back from Borneo, by the normal liner, and whisper
+“head-hunters” to the ever-ready note-books; and if she displays a
+_parang_ which some Dyak never used except for agricultural purposes,
+that will be enough to rouse surprise at her daring.
+
+But what are facts? There are limits, as we know, to the credulity
+of our fellows, as once Mr. Darwin, who considered exact evidence so
+important, discovered with a shock. What we really want is evidence we
+can understand, like that most discreet and wary old critic, the aunt
+of the young sailor. She quizzed him humorously about his flying fish,
+but was serious at once over that chariot wheel which was brought up on
+a fluke of his ship’s anchor in the Red Sea. She knew well enough where
+it was Pharaoh got what he asked for. Give us evidence in accord with
+our habits of thought, and we know where we are.
+
+Even I have discovered that there are readers of travellers’ tales
+who decline anything to which there is no reference in _Whitaker’s
+Almanac_. A very prudent attitude of mind. I cannot find fault with it
+because it does not accept mermaids from us, but I do suggest there may
+be things in the world which have not yet come under Mr. Whitaker’s
+eye. A little scepticism preserves the soul, though infertility would
+result if the soul were encased in it; which it rarely is, because
+luckily sceptics only disbelieve what is foreign to them, and accept in
+unquestioning faith whatever accords with their philosophy. It is true
+that more scepticism in the past might have saved us from many dragons
+and visiting angels, which in its absence spawned and flourished with
+impunity. On the other hand it would have shut out Mount Zion for
+ever. It must be said, too, that the good readers who repudiate with
+blighting amusement those narratives of travel which do not accord with
+Mr. Whitaker’s valuable index, will yet take, and with their eyes shut,
+much that compels seasoned travellers to smile bitterly.
+
+If you refer to Mr. Whitaker for the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas,
+for instance, you will fail to find concerning them one little fact:
+it is not advertised by Mr. Whitaker; not important enough, perhaps. I
+should never have known it myself, only I was there, once. I am not
+at all sure the fact is so insignificant that it should pass without
+notice, so I will record it here. At Ternate, an island which has been
+forgotten since white men ceased to kill each other for its cloves,
+it is easy to believe that you have really escaped from the world.
+Great gulfs of space and light separate you at Ternate from all the
+agitations by which civilized communities know that they are the buds,
+full of growing pains, on the tree of life. They are excellent gulfs
+of light. There are no agitations. Even the typhoons which herald the
+changes of the seasons, and not so far away, leave Ternate alone. Its
+volcano--the volcano is all the island--may blow up some day; but
+we should not expect earthly felicity to shine tranquilly for ever.
+Therefore while the isle persists it is delightful to walk the strands
+and by-paths of that oceanic garden of the tropics, and to feel the
+mind, so recently numbed by the uproar caused in the building of the
+Perfect State, revive in quietude. One day, on Ternate, I passed
+through the shade of a nutmeg grove, and came upon a lane at the back
+of the village. I could smell vanilla, and looked about for that
+orchid, and presently found it growing against a sugar palm. Behind
+that odorous shrubbery was a native house, and beyond the house, and
+far below it, the blue of the sea. Nobody was about. It was noon.
+It was hot. The high peak of Tidore across the water had athwart its
+cone a cloud which was as bright as an impaled moon. I saw no reason
+why this earth should not be a good place for us, and, thanking my
+fortune, idled along that lane till I saw another house, set back among
+hibiscus. It was a Malay home, but larger and better than is usual, for
+it had more timber in it. Along the front of the verandah was a board
+with a legend in Malay, the Communist Party of India. This confused me,
+so I strolled in to look closer, and saw hanging within the verandah
+portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Radek; there were others, though I
+was not communist enough to recognise them; but there they were in my
+lonely tropical garden, isolated by those gulfs of light and space
+from Moscow. The Dutch Resident, on hearing later of my extraordinary
+discovery, merely shot out his lower lip and spread his hands. Why yes,
+those little meeting houses were all over the East Indies. Such places,
+as well as the cinematograph.
+
+It is possible that that little fact, as a minor incident of travel,
+even if it is unknown to Mr. Whitaker, yet may qualify in its own time
+a number of those facts which are quite well-known to him and to us.
+
+When we are gazing about us in a strange land it is not easy to
+distinguish what is of importance from what is of no account. You can
+never tell whether the words of deepest significance are whispered at
+Government House or in some low haunt near the docks. It is a matter
+of luck. Time will show. In any case, even if you feel sure you have
+been vouchsafed a peep into the Book of Doom, and there saw, in the
+veritable script of an archangel, what you are at once anxious to
+announce to your fellows for their good, you may save yourself the
+trouble. If it is not already known, nobody will bother. There is
+precious little information of importance in the newspapers that has
+not been long matured in the wood. It is already as old as sin before
+the man in the street, poor fellow, gapes at it as news.
+
+It may be possible that the hunters of big game miss much while looking
+for lions, though their thrilling adventures naturally attract most
+of our attention. And how their records surprise into envy those shy
+travellers who think lions are quite all right as they are and where
+they are! The luck of some well-provided travellers is astonishing.
+They are never bored. They are never still. Only recently I was
+reading the book of a traveller back from the wilds, whose time had
+been occupied, while away, in leaping into the jaws of death and out
+again, which most of us would have found very trying in that heat. Some
+exercise is good for us, even in the tropics, but cutting that caper
+too often might do a man serious harm. That equatorial journey appears
+to have been a long series of frantic but jolly leaps from one threat
+of extinction to another--the crocodiles, lethal floods, gigantic fish,
+venomous snakes, and unarmed savages, were everywhere. It was a land
+where you have to wear top-boots to keep off the anacondas, as one
+might wear a steel helmet when meteors are about. But such a story is
+not so surprising as the serious delight with which it is received on
+publication, and perhaps with entire belief in its ordinary character
+for a land of that sort. I well understand it; for I can guess from
+the eager questions that have been put to me about the ubiquity of
+leopards by night, the serpents which festoon the forest, and the other
+noticeable wayside affairs of the wilderness, what could be done with
+a cheerful and fertile fancifulness. It would never do to disclose the
+plain truth, which is that one can grow as weary of the sameness of
+Borneo as of that of Islington. I know of one intrepid sojourner on far
+beaches, a novelist, who fascinates a multitude of readers with livid
+and staccato fiction in which figure island princesses whose breasts
+are dangerous with hidden daggers. Head-hunters and dissolute whites
+move there in a darkness which means Winchesters, but no sleep; even
+the intense beauty of those beaches is so like evil that only reckless
+men could face it. Yet in reality those islands are as placid as though
+laved by the waters of the Serpentine. A migration from Piccadilly to
+their shores would make the lovely but tigrish princesses show for
+what they are, no more dangerous than the young ladies peeling the
+potatoes at Cadby Hall. Indeed, their bold chronicler, who stimulates
+feverish longing in the dreary lassitude of England’s wage earners
+with a violent drug distilled from the beach refuse of that distant
+archipelago, does most of his work in the bed of a rest-house, which is
+never approached by a danger worse than a falling coconut.
+
+It seems possible for a romanticist, if he is cynical enough, and if
+he injects his stimulant with a syringe of about the measure of a
+foot-pump, to have a nice success with those who suffer from the speed
+and distraction of our homeland; for though the sufferers will take
+any stimulant, yet their nerves respond to very little that is not as
+coarse as a weed-killer. This should not be regretted. It would be
+dismal, indeed, if they were completely insensitive. The high speed
+of our weeks driven by machinery, the clangour of engines, crime,
+and politics, the fear which never leaves the poor victims, for they
+have been parted from the quiet earth which gives shelter and food,
+have depraved their bodies and starved their natural appetites. It is
+a wonder that they feel anything, or care for anything. They are left
+with but a vague yearning for some life, for any life different from
+their own; but they are so far gone that they cannot conceive that it
+might be a life of peace and goodwill. Their very sunrises must be
+bloody, like their familiar news, or they would not know it for the
+dayspring; yet the full measure of their fall from grace, which only
+an alienist could rightly gauge, is that they are not satisfied with a
+dusky bosom unless it conceals a knife.
+
+But when you are out in these barbarous lands you find that princesses,
+unluckily, are even less noticeable than the leopards, and when seen
+are less beautiful. They do not wear knives in their bosoms for the
+same reason that other charmers dispense with them. Indeed, there is
+no end to the difference between what you have been led to expect in
+a place, and what is there. Compare the reality of a tropical forest
+with its popular picture. That popular notion of it did not grow in
+the tropics, but in the pages of imaginative fiction and poetry.
+Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it is not so easy to read.
+One may see more orchids in Kew Gardens in a day than in a year of
+the tropical woods. If the Garden of Eden had been anything like the
+Amazon jungle, then our first parents would never have been evicted;
+they would have moved fairly soon on their own account, without giving
+notice. A few coloured snakes, on some days, would break the brooding
+monotony of that forest. They are, however, rarely seen. The animals
+of these fastnesses seldom show themselves. When they do, it is done
+inadvertently, and they are off at once. If you meet a tiger when on
+a ramble by daylight, you may consider yourself lucky if his sudden
+departure gives you two seconds of him before he is gone for ever.
+After dark, of course, you would take care that he could not meet you
+alone, for that place is not yours after sunset, and he knows it.
+
+Tigers, snakes, lovely but malignant nymphs, and head-hunters, are
+not the dangers. What kills men in the outer wilderness is anxiety,
+undernourishment, and mosquitoes. The mosquito, the little carrier of
+malaria, is a more exacting enemy of the adventurer than the harpies
+and dragons of the fairy tales ever were to knights-errant. He is worse
+than all the cannibal tribes. Head-hunters, it must be confessed, are
+far better for conveying liveliness to the pages of a travel book, if
+it is to be worth the great price usually charged for it. Naturally,
+a reader wants his money’s worth. A mosquito will not go far, if you
+are an author, and are writing high romance. When, however, you are
+dealing personally with the realities of the Congo, you will discover a
+tendency to feel more concern over the small flies which carry fevers
+and sleeping sickness than for all the lions and cannibals in Africa.
+A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would
+look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the saint he had only a dragon to
+overcome.
+
+Now the travellers who accompany cinema operators to the outer dangers
+are always careful to explain to their eager interviewers, for the
+lucrative object of a publicity as wide as it can be got, the horrific
+perils of human flesh-pots, poisoned arrows, giant reptiles, and the
+other theatrical properties which are recognised instantly by everybody
+with the requisite awe. On the other hand, we learn from the Liverpool
+School of Tropical Medicine that the young men who go to Africa to
+hunt down that elusive creature the trypanosome of sleeping sickness,
+venture out unannounced, though they have spent years, and not weeks,
+in preparing themselves for their perilous quest. They go unannounced,
+are granted but £100 a year as a reward, and return--if they have
+that luck--less recognisable than the firemen of their ships; for the
+very firemen, as we know, have been the subject of happy verse. Yet
+compared with the skill and enterprise and courage needed for the
+hunting of that trypanosome, the killing of lions is no more than the
+handing of milk to kittens. The threats and terrors of the mythologies,
+the cynocephali, anthropophagi, gorgons, and krakens, were but coarse
+grimaces to the premonition which would make a modern traveller scuttle
+home, if he allowed it to numb his heart when he is alone, and hungry
+and fatigued, in the place where the tiny harbingers of fevers and
+dissolution are at their liveliest. St. George, with all the sacred
+incantations of the Church, could not fight such a dragon. But there
+the difficulty is. It cannot be made into a dramatic picture. It is
+merely an invisible presence, a haunting diffusion, like doom itself.
+It cannot be fought. There can be no heroics. There can be no escape.
+It is one with the sly hush of the wilderness.
+
+
+V
+
+A friend who lives on Long Island says in a letter: “A tall Cunarder
+putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo
+Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show.” No doubt; for he is not
+a sailor but a man of letters. It is proper that to him the sight of
+a distant ship, outward bound, should be more appealing than anything
+he would see at the Opera House. He knows those operas, which are like
+nothing on earth except operas; but the tall ship, as he calls it,
+standing out into windy space, rarefied by overwhelming light, to him
+is Argo; but to a sailor Argo is a legend and nothing on earth, for he
+is moved by that sort of thing only when he sees it in opera. The ship
+may look as unsubstantial and legendary as she likes; she may, because
+she is outward bound, suggest to a man of letters the happy release he
+will never get from all his contracts with publishers and house-agents;
+but she is as hard, and is conditioned by as much that is inexorable,
+as a money-lender’s mortgage.
+
+But what a poster an artist can make of her! No artist, however gifted,
+could do that with a publisher’s contract or a mortgage. So a ship,
+after all, whatever nautical and engineering science may do with
+her, aided by the tastes and habits of millionaires, and the rules
+and regulations of many committees of exacting experts, must be a
+symbol which still suggests to men in bondage an undiscovered golden
+shore, or fleece, of which they will continue to dream, as they dream
+irrationally of peace while never ceasing to fashion war.
+
+So long as men who must stay ashore are thrilled when they see a liner
+going out, or do no more on a half-holiday than idle about the docks
+and speculate around the queer foreign names and ports of registry that
+show on steamers’ counters, or sit on a beach and throw stones into the
+water, we may still hope to change the ugly look of things. There is
+precious little sustenance of hope in whatever keeps us industrious,
+but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and sink into idle
+stargazing.
+
+Stuck on a corner of the morning railway station, where we cannot miss
+it though usually we have not the time to stop and look at it, is a
+large poster inviting us to See the Midnight Sun. It shows a liner, and
+she is heading towards an Arctic glory as bright as any boy’s dream of
+a great achievement. But it is not stuck there for boys to look at it,
+though they do. It is meant for those who have been so practical and
+level-headed in a longish life that they can afford a yachting cruise
+to the Arctic Circle. Doubtless, therefore, they make those cruises. I
+can account for that poster in no other way. It is one of the strangest
+and most significant facts in industrial society. All very well for
+some of us to read--wasting time as wantonly as if we had a dozen lives
+to play with--every volume on Arctic travel we can reach, knowing as we
+read that we shall never even cross the Pentland Firth.
+
+But that station poster is addressed to those who are supposed never to
+dream, for they have attained to Threadneedle Street. What do they want
+with the Midnight Sun? Haven’t they got the “Morning Post”? But there
+you are. Even now they feel they have missed something, and whatever it
+is they will go to the Arctic to look for it. Cannot they find it in
+Threadneedle Street? Apparently not. That poster on a suburban station,
+though I cannot afford to miss the train to examine it for useful
+details, is like a faint promising hail from a time not yet come. Man
+is still in his early youth. He may come back from an Arctic holiday
+some day, or a recreation in China, push over Threadneedle Street with
+a laugh, and begin anew.
+
+Men of letters who gaze longingly after departing ships, and men of
+business who are in those ships without the excuse of business, are
+proof enough that their many inventions, so far, have not got them what
+they wanted. For London is not quite the loveliness we meant to make
+it, and we know it. The ruthless place dismays us. In our repulsion
+from it we say it ought to be called Dementia, and invent golf and the
+week-end cottage to revive the soul it deadens without recompense.
+All to no purpose. There is nothing for it but to destroy London and
+rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire or else to escape from it,
+if we can; though no guarding dragon of a grim prison was ever such
+a sleepless, cunning, and ugly-tempered brute as the machine we have
+made with our own hands. No wonder it pays to decorate the walls of
+the capital with romantic but seditious pictures of palms, midnight
+suns, coasts of illusion and ships outward bound. Nothing could so
+plainly indicate our revolt from the affairs we must somehow pretend to
+venerate.
+
+It is not the sea itself, not all that salt water, which we find
+attractive. Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea. No
+matter what its smiles may be like, we doubt its friendliness. It is
+about as friendly as the volcano which is benign because it does not
+feel like blowing up. What draws us to the sea is the light over it.
+Try listening, in perfect safety, to combers breaking among the reefs
+on a dark night, and then say whether you enjoy the voice of great
+waters. No, it is the wonder of light without bounds which draws us to
+the docks to overcome the distractions and discomforts of departure.
+We see there is wide freedom in the world, after all, if only we had
+the will to take it. And unfailingly we make strange landfalls during
+an escape, coasts of illusion if you like, and under incredible skies,
+but sufficient to shake our old conviction of those realities we had
+supposed we were obliged to accept. There are other worlds.
+
+
+VI
+
+My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never
+have called them that. They were volumes which were a substitute for
+literature when the season was dry. A reader once complained to me,
+and with justice, that as a literary feuilletonist I betrayed no
+pure literary predilections. “You never devote your page,” he said
+fretfully, “to the influence of the Pleiades. You never refer to 18th
+century literature. You never look back on names familiar to all who
+read Latin. What is interesting to truly curious and bookish people
+might not exist for you. I wonder, for example, if Nahum Tate were
+mentioned in a conversation, whether you would be able to say what it
+meant.”
+
+Well, not exactly that. I fear my readiness for the challenge would not
+pass the test. All that would happen to me would be a recollection of
+white walls, bright but severe, on which are scattered black memorial
+tablets, one of them with a ship over it carved in alabaster. An
+interior as cool and quiet as a mausoleum. There are shadows moving on
+the luminous white; June trees are murmuring outside. There is a smell
+of clothes preserved till Sunday in camphor and in sandalwood boxes. A
+big venerable man is perched high in a rich and glowing mahogany box,
+whose lifted chin, jutting saliently from white sideboard whiskers,
+has a dent in its centre; he is talking, with his eyes shut, to one
+he calls Gard, and I listen to him with deep interest, for once that
+old man served with John Company, which to a minor figure in his
+congregation seems miraculous. Then we all stand, and sing the words
+of a poet strangely named Tate & Brady. Would anyone wish me to quote
+the words, in proof? Certainly not. There is no need. When we come
+out of that building there is a stone awry on the grass by the door,
+commemorating one who was a “Master-Mariner, of Plymouth,” and a verse
+can be just deciphered on it, which reads:
+
+    Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion’s coast,
+    The storms all weathered and the ocean crost,
+    Sinks into port in some well-favoured isle,
+    Where billows never roar, and brighter seasons smile.
+
+The learned literary critics may be as wise as they please, but there
+is no undoing the early circumstances which have made some names in
+literature of significance to us, and have put other names, perhaps
+even greater, forever in the dark. Our literary predilections were cast
+at our birth. So much depends, too, on where we heard a name first,
+and what was about the book when we read it. That is the reason why my
+correspondent’s letter is not irrelevant here, for it caught me out.
+It gave away the game. It showed me that I could never be a critic of
+letters. When his complaint came to me, some books for review were
+beside me. But what was I doing? Sitting in the shade, looking absently
+at a dazzling summer afternoon just beyond the chair, for I had just
+read with close attention this fragment in English:
+
+  From three to nine miles north-eastward of the northern part of
+  Sangi is a group of islands named Nipa, Bukit, Poa, and Liang,
+  respectively, and about nine miles farther eastward is a chain of
+  six islets and two detached reefs, which extend about nine miles
+  in a north-northeast and opposite directions. From Inis islet, the
+  southernmost of this chain, a reef of rocks extends some distance
+  southward, and it should be given a good berth. All the above islets
+  are covered with coconut trees, but very little is known about them.
+
+Then there followed, for over three hundred closely printed pages,
+references to many outlandish names, probably occult, such as Busu
+Busu (“good drinking water may be obtained from a spring at the foot
+of the hill behind the missionary’s house”), Berri Berri Road, Rau
+Strait (“it has not been surveyed and is dangerous”), Tanjong Salawai,
+Pulo Gunong Api (I know enough to say that that means the island
+of the mountain of fire), Gisi and Pakal, Ceram Laut (“is high and
+hilly, and had on it, in 1898, a remarkable tree, 428 feet over the
+sea, which makes a good mark”), Suruake of the Goram Islands (“the
+inhabitants are quarrelsome and warlike ... anchorage off Wiseleat
+village, on the north side, in 24 fathoms, at over one mile from the
+shore and 130 yards from the steep to reef, with a hawser to the
+latter to prevent driving”). I had been idling with that book, with
+the work of the latest enterprising novelists waiting beside me for
+my immediate attention, all the morning, and still could not let it
+go. Then came the querulous letter pointing out my indifference to
+the English literature of the 18th century; which in one respect was
+unjust, for if once I got going on Gulliver I might soon be in prison
+for sedition. Yet the rebuke was well merited. I would sooner read any
+volume of Directions for Pilots than the Latin poets. (And I should
+like to ask whether Ceram Laut has not been sighted since 1898). On
+the whole, I would much rather sit in a cabin of a ship which had just
+made fast again, and listen to the men who had brought her home, than
+read the best modern fiction. I should feel nearer to the centre of
+life. Never mind the name of the book which had made that a finer day
+for me. You will not find it in the circulating libraries; but it has
+an official rote, initialled, and is guaranteed by the Hydrographic
+Office, Admiralty; so there must be something in it. The volume, in
+fact, is mysterious only in the queer effect it has upon me. I dare not
+commend it for general reading, but I myself would sooner peruse it
+than the essays of Addison because I get more out of it. I should like
+to describe, in some detail, the place where I bought it, the man who
+sold it to me, what he said about it, and the seclusions of the Java
+and Arafura Seas where, far from all contact with English literature,
+I afterwards examined it. One sunrise, by the aid of this very book, I
+knew what I saw ahead on the horizon was Pulo Gunong Api.
+
+
+VII
+
+Someone stumbled down the bridge ladder for which I was making. I
+could see nothing, but I heard the voice of the chief mate. He was
+annoyed with himself. Since nightfall our steamer had been without
+body, except the place where one stood. With a steady look it was just
+possible to find faith in the substance of the alleyway where the
+two of us paused to gossip, for its white paint might have been the
+adherence to the ship of the faintest trace of the day which had gone.
+Somewhere ahead of us a promontory of Africa reached almost to our
+course. Our course was laid just to miss it. We were keeping watch for
+its light. But if the void at the world’s end had been under our prow
+we should not have known it. It was a dark night. An iron door in the
+alleyway clanged open with an explosion of light. The light projected
+solidly overside, with an Arab fireman brightly encased in it, who was
+emptying sacks of ash.
+
+Before daybreak the roar of our cable woke me. When I peered through
+the cabin port I thought we had anchored in the midst of a cluster of
+stars. That was Oran. I should see Africa in the morning. When we left
+Barry Dock with coal the weather was like the punishment for sin; but
+tomorrow we should see a white town in the sun, the descendants of the
+Salee rovers, and Africa--Africa for the first time.
+
+Those first impressions! Quite often our first impression of a place is
+also our last, and it depends solely upon the weather and the food.
+This is not doing justice to the world. We shall never learn enough
+to do justice to our world unless there is something in this talk of
+transmigration and metamorphosis. I might, for instance, have written
+down Oran as a mere continuation of the coast of Wales, because next
+morning the captain and I landed at a jetty, wearing oilskins. This was
+Africa’s coral strand--how quaint it is, the way the romantic use the
+facts!--and the grandchildren of the Sallee rovers were carrying coal
+in baskets, from which black liquid poured down their bodies. To judge
+by their appearance of bowed and complete submission, every drop of
+pirate blood had been washed out of them long ago.
+
+There might have been mountains behind the town, though it was hard to
+see them. Something seemed to be there, but it was thin and smeared.
+Africa, so far as I could see it that morning, was the office of a
+shipping agent, where we gossiped of steamers and men we knew, looked
+at maps on the walls, and wondered what the agent’s fading photographs
+represented. Then we caught an electric tram, which took us to an hotel
+in a French town, a town well-ordered and righteously commercial,
+and garrisoned by French soldiers in cherry-colored bloomers; for
+this was years ago. The bedroom had a tiled floor, but no fireplace,
+because the house was built on the theory that we were in Africa, and
+by getting under a red bale of eiderdown one managed to keep from
+perishing.
+
+Well, Oran chose to show itself the next morning. You could see then
+that Wales was very far to the north. Winter, perhaps, had found out in
+the night that it was in the wrong place. It had gone home. It was not
+worth while returning to the ship, so I stayed ashore.
+
+The best moments of a traveller are not likely to be divined from the
+list of the ship’s ports of call. They are inconsequential. It is no
+good looking for them. They do not seem to be native to any particular
+spot on earth. They have no relation to the chart. It is impossible
+to define every one of their elements, and, worse luck, they are
+not rewards for endurance and patience. You do not go to them. They
+surprise you as you pass. Nor should they serve as material for travel
+narrative unless you would make your report delusive, for they have no
+geographical bearings. Nobody is likely to find them again. It is no
+good talking about them. Yet without them travel would be worse than
+the job of the urban dust collector. The wind bloweth where it listeth,
+and there is no telling how and in what place the happy incidence of
+light and understanding will come.
+
+Last summer, when walking through a sunken Dorsetshire lane, there
+was the ghost of an odour I knew, though I could not name it; and at
+that moment I began to think of a man I met in France early in the
+war. I climbed the bank to see what was growing above. Bean flowers!
+Any survivor of the First Hundred Thousand will remember that odour
+while he lives. The memory of Hesketh Prichard and the smell of bean
+flowers make for me the same apparition: the white bones of Ypres in
+the first June of it. Smell is likely to have much to do with a first
+impression. The Somme battleground, once you were under its threat, I
+think, was raw marl and smoking rubbish. It doesn’t do, to-day, to walk
+unexpectedly into the whiff of a place where old rubbish is mouldering
+in a field on a moist day, not if you are with friends; they may think
+you are mad; they would not be far wrong, either.
+
+Yes, smell has a lot to do with it. It recalls what the eye registered,
+put away, and forgot. I shall never forget my first voyage, not while
+steam tractors are allowed to poison and destroy the streets of London.
+The gust of hot grease from one of them, as it thunders past, pictures
+for me what could be seen of the North Sea (December, too!) from the
+companion hatch of a trawler; a world black and ghast upset out of the
+sunrise and running down to founder us. The breath of the engine-room
+puffed up the hatch as she rolled. She had an over-heated bearing
+somewhere, for the engines had been racing all night; it had been one
+of those nights at sea. The coaming of the hatch was wet and cold, and
+the hard wind tasted of iron and salt. The steward was knocking about
+the coffee cups at the foot of the ladder; but I did not want any. For
+some unreasonable cause now I do not object to the greasy smell and
+thunder of steam tractors.
+
+
+VIII
+
+There should be no itinerary but the course of things. The plan of a
+journey is made to be broken. Only famous travellers who make daring
+flights by air to remote coasts to provide aeroplane builders, or
+manufacturers of synthetic nourishment, with bold advertisements, ever
+dare to say when we may watch for their return. Let us never challenge
+the gods, who do not exist, as to-day we all know, yet who may grow
+peevish if we not only deny their existence, but behave with arrogance,
+as though to show them that superior man has taken their place.
+
+Reason was only given to us that we might comfort ourselves with it. I
+remember the smoke-room of a steamer, which was almost deserted, for
+it was near midnight. Three fellow passengers sat near me, and they
+were estimating the hour of our arrival in the morning. Their discourse
+was leisurely and casual, but they were confident; they knew; and with
+the elaborate and solid worth of that saloon to accommodate even our
+tobacco smoke, what doubt could there be about human judgments? As to
+our arrival, we could tell you within about fifteen minutes. I think
+my fellow-travellers were men of commerce, for they were familiar with
+the habits of our line and of many other lines; they could judge the
+hour when we should be home; and they were assured that to relieve
+humankind of poverty and war would be to invite God’s punishment for
+unfaithfulness. Then they emptied their glasses and left the place to
+me and a huge American negro pugilist, who had a fur-lined overcoat and
+many diamonds, and who spoke to the steward as a gruff man would to a
+dog.
+
+Our steamer gave the assurance of that astronomical certitude which
+is inherent in great and impersonal affairs. She held on immensely
+and with celerity. Sometimes, when one of the screws came out of the
+water, a loose metal ash-tray on the table forgot itself, became alive
+and danced, like an escape of the amusement felt by the ship over
+some secret knowledge she had; hilarity she at once suppressed. The
+ash-tray became still and apparently ashamed of what it had done. The
+slow rolling of the steamer was only the maintenance of her poise in
+a wonderful speed. If your head leaned against the woodwork you could
+hear the profound murmuring of her energy. We were doing well. No doubt
+the men who had just gone out were right--at least, about the time of
+our arrival.
+
+Outside, the promenade deck was vacant. Most of its lights were out.
+The portal to the room which accommodated our tobacco pipes announced
+itself to the darkness with a bright red bulb and black lettering.
+There was an infinity of night. One could not see far into it, but it
+poured over us in an unending flood. The red bulb seemed rather small
+after all. There was no sea. There was only an occasional sound and
+an illusion of fleeting spectres. Going down the muffled stairway to
+my cabin I met my steward. He warned me that we should be in by seven
+o’clock. The corridor below was silent, its doors all shut, and another
+steward was at the end of the empty lane, contemplative, reposeful,
+the unnecessary watchman of a secure city. The accustomed sounds of the
+ship, far away and subdued, were the earnest of an inevitable routine
+and predestination. Almost home now! I switched off the light; began
+planning the morrow into a well-earned holiday.... And then someone was
+shaking me with insistence. It was only the steward. The electric light
+was bright in my eyes.
+
+“Not six yet, surely?”
+
+“Not quite four, sir. But there’s not enough water for her to get in.
+Better get up now. A tug is expected.”
+
+Here we were then. The engines had done their work. They had stopped.
+Though it was so early, I could hear people constantly passing along
+the corridor, and not with their usual leisure. Fussy folk! Plenty of
+time to shave and put things away! No need to hurry when this was the
+end of it.
+
+On deck it was still dark. Nothing could be heard but the running of
+the tide along the body of our stationary ship. The note of the water
+was pitched curiously high. It was something like the sound of a tide
+running out quickly over shallows. An officer hurried through a loose
+group of passengers, politely disengaging himself from their inquiries,
+and vanished into the darkness of the after-deck. There were only a
+few lights. They seemed to be irrelevant. Only odd fragments of the
+ship could be seen. She was but a lump, and was doing nothing, and
+her people wandered about her busily but without aim. I could hear an
+officer’s voice loudly directing some business by the poop; there was
+that sound, and the thin hissing of a steam-pipe.
+
+A big man in an ulster, whom I recognised as one of the fellows
+who, the night before, had decided at what hour we should arrive,
+began telling me rapidly how necessary it was for him to catch some
+train “absolutely without fail.” I think he said he had an important
+engagement. I was not listening to him very intently. The ship was
+aground.
+
+But he did not appear to know it. Like the other passengers, he moved
+to and fro, all ready to start for home, within a few paces of his
+suit-case. These people waited in confident groups for the tender,
+guarding their possessions. Some of them were annoyed because the
+tender was dilatory.
+
+There was no sign of any tender. Beyond us was only the murmuring of
+the running waters, and the darkness. Through the night a distant
+sea-lamp stared at us so intently that it winked but once a minute.
+Its eye slowly closed then, as if tired, but at once became fixed and
+intent again.
+
+I was leaning over the port side, and the port side was leaning, too.
+She had a decided list. A seaman came near me and dropped the lead
+overside. He gave the result to someone behind me, and I turned. Two
+fathoms! The mate grinned and left us.
+
+The darkness, as we waited for the tender which did not come, was
+thinned gradually by light from nowhere. I could now see the creature
+with one yellow eye. It was a skeleton standing in the sea on many
+legs. Some leaden clouds formed on the roof of night. The waters
+expanded. Low in the east, where the dawn was a pale streak, as if day
+had got a bright wedge into the bulk of chaos, was the minute black
+serration of a town. The guardian lamp at sea grew longer legs as the
+water fell, and when at last the sun looked at us the skeleton was
+standing on wide yellow sands. The ship was heeling over considerably
+now, for she was on the edge of the sands; the engineers put over a
+ladder and went to look at the propellers.
+
+It was hours past the time of our arrival. There was no tender. There
+was no water. The distant town was indifferent. It made no sign.
+Perhaps it did not know we were there. The lady passengers, careless of
+their appearance, slept in deck chairs, grey and unkempt. The man who
+had to be in London before noon “without fail” was also asleep, and
+his children were playing about a coil of rope with a kitten.
+
+
+IX
+
+My first attempt to read at sea was a dreary failure. Yet how I desired
+a way to salvation. We were over the Dogger Bank. It was mid-winter. It
+was my first experience of deep water. A sailor would not call fifteen
+fathoms deep water; I know that now; yet if you suppose the North Sea
+is not the real thing when your ship is a trawler, and the time is
+Christmas, then do not go to find out. Do not look for the pleasure of
+travel in that form.
+
+That morning, hanging to the guide rope of a perpendicular ladder, and
+twice thrown off to dangle free in a ship which seemed to be turning
+over, I mounted to watch the coming of the sun. It was a moment of
+stark revelation, and I was shocked by it. I could see I was alone with
+my planet. We faced each other. The size of my own globe--the coldness
+of its grandeur--the ease with which swinging shadows lifted us out
+of a lower twilight to glimpse the dawn, an arc of sun across whose
+bright face black shapes were moving, and then plunged us into gloom
+again--its daunting indifference! Where was God? No friend was there.
+There were ourselves and luck. That night a great gale blew.
+
+So I tried Omar Khayyam, which was an act of folly. I could not resign
+myself even to the ship’s Bible, the only other book aboard. Printed
+matter is unnecessary when life is acutely conscious of itself, and is
+aware, without the nudge of poetry, of its fragility and briefness. I
+tried to read the Christmas number of a magazine, but that was worse
+than noughts and crosses. “You come into the wheel-house,” said the
+mate, “and stand the middle watch with me. It’s all right when you face
+it.” In the still seclusion of the wheel-house after midnight, where
+the sharpest sound was the occasional abrupt clatter of the rudder
+chains in their pipes, where the loosened stars shot across the windows
+and back again, where the faint glow of the binnacle lamp showed, for
+me, but my companion’s priestly face, and where chaos occasionally
+hissed and crashed on our walls, I found what books could not give me.
+The mate sometimes mumbled, or put his face close to the glass to peer
+ahead. They had a youngster one voyage, he told me, who was put aboard
+another trawler going home. The youngster was ill. That night it blew
+like hell out of the north-west. In the morning, so the hands advised
+the mate, “the youngster’s bunk had been slept in, so they said the
+other trawler would never get to port, and she didn’t.” I listened to
+the mate, and the sweep of the waves. The ship trembled when we were
+struck. But it seemed to me that all was well, though I don’t know why.
+What has reason to do with it? Is the sea rational?
+
+After that voyage there were others, and sometimes a desert of time to
+give to books. Yet if to-night we were crossing the Bay, going out,
+and she was a wet ship, I should have a dim reminder of the sensations
+of my first voyage, and much prefer the voice of a shipmate to a book.
+The books then would not be out of the trunk. They would do well where
+they were, for a time. The first week, uncertain and strange, the ship
+unfamiliar and not at all like the good ships you used to know so well;
+her company not yet a community, and the old man annoyed with his
+owners, his men, his coal, and his mistaken choice of a profession--the
+first week never sees the barometer set fair for reading. Some minds
+indeed will never hold tight to a book when at sea. Mine will not.
+What is literature when you have a trade wind behind you? I have tried
+a classical author then, but it was easier to keep the eye on the
+quivering light from the seas reflected on the bright wall of my cabin.
+It might have been the very spirit of life dancing in my own little
+place. It was joyous. It danced lightly till I was hypnotised, and
+slept in full repose on a certitude of the virtue of the world.
+
+But recently there was an attempt, the time being spring, to cut
+out the dead books from my shelves, the books in which there was no
+longer any sign of life. Then I took that classical author, rejected
+one memorable voyage, and looked at his covers. When he was on the
+ship with me I found him meagre and incommunicative. Something has
+happened to him in the meantime, however. He is all right now. His
+covers, I notice, have been nibbled by exotic cockroaches, and their
+cryptic message adds a value to the classic which I find new and good.
+Scattered on the floor, too, I see a number of guide books. They are
+soiled. They are ragged. Their maps are hanging out. When I really
+needed them I was shy of being seen in their company, and they were
+left in the ship’s cabin during the day, or in the hotel bedroom. The
+maps and plans were studied. Sometimes they were torn out of a book and
+pocketed; I could never find the courage to walk about Rome or Palermo
+with a Baedeker. It always seemed to me like the wearing of a little
+Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes on the coat collar.
+
+Those guide books were more interesting on the wet days of a
+journey, when it was impossible, or undesirable, to go roaming. They
+were full of descriptions of those things one must on no account
+overlook when in a country. Yet in the fine morning after a wet day,
+when I went out without a guide book, the little living peculiarities
+of the town, which the book had not even mentioned--because everybody
+ought to be aware of them, of course--were so remarkable that the place
+where Ariadne was turned into a fountain, and where Aphrodite tried to
+seduce another handsome young mortal, were forgotten.
+
+[Illustration: _I met a cheerful goatherd._]
+
+So once, when hunting near Syracuse for “the famous _Latonie_, or stone
+quarries, in certain of which the Athenian prisoners were confined,”
+and several of whom were spared, so the book said, because they could
+repeat choruses of Euripides, I met a cheerful goatherd, an old man,
+with a newly fallen kid under his arm, who told me, in an American
+language so modern that I hardly knew it, that he used to sell peanuts
+in Chicago. He did not repeat choruses from Euripides, but even the
+great dramatist, I am sure, would have been surprised by the fables of
+the peanut merchant. I forgot the quarries, while listening to them.
+The fabulist and I sat with our backs against a boulder over which
+leaned an olive tree. The goats stood around, and stared at us; and
+not, I believe, without some understanding of their master’s stories.
+
+I am reminded of this because a map of southeastern Sicily is hanging
+out of a book, the banner of a red-letter day. I rescued the volume
+from the mass of discarded lumber, and found that inside the cover
+of the book I had drawn a plan of the harbour of Tunis. Why? I’ve
+forgotten the reason. But I remember Tunis, for I had been drawn
+thither by this very book, which had said that nobody should leave the
+Mediterranean without seeing Tunis. There it was, one day. From the
+deck of my French ship I saw electric trams and the familiar _hôtels
+des étrangers_. A galley with pirates at its sweeps was pulling almost
+alongside us, and desperately I hailed it, threw in my bag, and
+directed them to take me to a steamer flying the Italian flag, for that
+steamer, clearly enough, was leaving Tunis at once. That was the ship
+for me. There was some difficulty with the dark ruffians who manned the
+galley, who followed me aboard the steamer. There they closed round
+me, a motley and savage crew. They demanded gold in some quantity,
+and with menacing flourishes, shattering voices, and hot eager eyes.
+Their leader was a huge negro in a white robe and a turban, whose
+expressive gargoyle, with a loose red gash across its lower part, had
+been pitted by smallpox. I did not like the look of him. He towered
+over me, and leaned down to bring his ferocity closer to my face. Some
+Italian sailors stopped to watch the scene, and I thought they were
+pitying this Englishman. But the latter was weary of Roman ruins, of
+hotels, of other thoughtful provision for strangers surprising in its
+open and obvious accessibility, and of guides and thieves--especially
+of thieves, shameless, insatiable, and arrogant in their demands for
+doing nothing whatever. At first he had paid them, for he was a weak
+and silly stranger who did not know the land; but now, sick of it
+all, he turned wearily on that black and threatening gargoyle while
+it was still in full spate of Arabic, shook his fist at it, and cried
+suddenly what chief mates bawl when things are in a desperate plight
+and constraint is useless. To his astonishment and relief the negro
+stepped back, turned to his crew and said to them sadly, in plain
+English, “Come on, it’s no bloody good.” The gang left that ship as
+modestly as carol singers who find they have been chanting “Christians
+Awake” to an empty house. Now, evidently guide books cannot lead you
+to such pleasing interludes, and may even beguile you away from them.
+I mean that books cannot guide you to those best rewards for travel,
+unless, of course, they are old and stained. They are full then of
+interesting addenda of which their editors know nothing, and of symbols
+with an import only one traveller may read. So when the days come in
+which, as guide books, they will not be wanted, you may read in them
+what is not there. This very guide book to the Mediterranean, for
+example, under the heading of “Oran,” describes it as “the capital of
+a province, military division, 60,000 inhabitants. It is not certain
+that Oran existed in the time of the Romans.” Some people would like us
+to believe that no place on earth can be of much interest unless the
+Romans once flattened it into meekness. But we have heard far too much
+of these Romans. They bore us. To-day we call them captains of industry
+and company promoters. Oran, or what I could see of it in the dark when
+we arrived, was as rich in promise as though it were thoroughly impeded
+with classical ruins. There were lights that were a concourse of
+planets, and as I lay reading in my bunk the ship was so quiet that you
+could hear the paint crack on a bulkhead rivet. I was reading this very
+guide book then, and it told me that beyond those calm and mysterious
+planets were Tlemçen, and Ein Sefra, “an oasis 1,110 metres above
+the sea level belonging to the Duled Sidi Sheikh. Here one catches
+a glimpse of the Algerian desert, which is the fringe of the Great
+Sahara.” I caught that glimpse, too, the next week.
+
+These guide books, when you are home again, are as good as great
+literature. There, for another instance, is Baedeker’s “Switzerland.”
+Now the truth is, that book, bought for the first journey to the Alps,
+was among the things I forgot to pack. It was never missed. It is only
+to-day that we find it is indispensable. For it was bought in the
+winter of 1913. Again it was night, when we arrived. A sleigh met us,
+and took us noiselessly into the vaguely white unknown. Pontresina is
+a good name. In the morning there were the shutters of a bedroom to
+be opened, and a child who was with me gazed with wide eyes when the
+morning light discovered to him a field of ice poised ethereally on
+clouds, though the night had not gone from the valley below us; above
+the ice was a tincture of rose on far peaks. Is it likely that he will
+forget it? Or I? In any case, there is a diorama of those peaks in our
+guide book, and what rosy light is absent from that picture we can give
+to it.
+
+
+X
+
+Mayne Reid once persuaded us that to have a full life we should kill
+grizzly bears, bison and Indians. We were so sure he was right that
+school and work in London were then the proof of our reduction to
+pallor in servitude. We have been, since then, near enough to a bison
+to try it with a biscuit, but have never seen the smoke of a wigwam
+even in the distance. There remains with us a faint hope that a day
+will come when we shall see that smoke, for such a name as Athabasca
+is still in the world of the topless towers of Ilium; but some records
+of modern hunters of big game, published exultingly, have cured us of
+an old affliction of the mind. So far as we are concerned the lives of
+lions and bears are secure.
+
+We now open a new volume on sport with an antipathy increased to a
+repugnance we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent
+narrative by an American writer, who had been collecting in Africa for
+a museum. He confessed that if he had not been a scientist he would
+have felt remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast
+of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the
+infant, without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a
+corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother; a nice group.
+That tableau, at that moment when the job was neatly finished, must
+have looked rather like good luck when collecting types in a foreign
+slum. He must have had a happy feeling when skinning the child.
+
+The heroic big-game hunter, with his picturesque gear, narrow escapes,
+and dreadful hardships, is a joke it is easy to understand since our
+so very recent experience of man himself as a dangerous animal. The
+sabre-toothed tiger of the past was a dove compared with the creature
+who is pleased to suppose that he was created in the likeness of
+his Maker. No predatory dinosaur ever equalled man’s praiseworthy
+understudy of the Angel of Death. Some years ago, on the arrival of
+fresh news at Headquarters in France of another most ingenious and
+successful atrocity, I remarked to a staff officer of the Intelligence
+Department that if this sort of thing developed progressively it
+would end in the enforced recruitment of orangutans. But that officer
+happened to be a naturalist. “No good,” he replied. “They wouldn’t
+do these things.” Such acts are the prerogative of man, who won the
+privilege in his upward progress.
+
+With his modern weapons and ammunition, an experienced sportsman
+challenging a lion stands in little more danger than if he were buying
+a rug. The shock of his bullet would stagger a warehouse. It pulps the
+vitals of the animal. There is a friend of mine whose pastime it is to
+shoot big game, and we should pity any tiger he meets. It is not a
+tiger to him. It is only a target, which he regards with the composure
+into which he settles when someone brings him a long drink on a salver;
+and his common habit with a target is to group his shots till they
+blot out the bull’s eye. What chance has a tiger against so tender a
+creature? A rabbit would have more, for it is smaller. But at least
+it can be said for my friend that it merely happens that he prefers
+such fun to golf; he attaches no importance to it. Though he has
+shot an unfortunate example of every large mammal Asia has to offer,
+he does not plead that he has done so in the name of Science. Man
+himself, with appliances that reduce the craft of the tiger to a few
+interesting tricks, and an arm which paralyses a whale with one blow,
+is the most terrible animal in the world. He is the Gorgon. It is his
+glance which turns life to stone. Science, as stuffed animals are often
+called, excuses the abomination of any holocaust. If a nightingale were
+dilated with cotton-wool instead of music, that would be “science,”
+supposing it were the last of the nightingales. The reason given for
+the slaughter of so many harmless gorillas in the neighbourhood of
+Lake Kivu by several travellers was that those rare animals are dying
+out, and museums required them. Yet it may be said for us that these
+sportsmen find it necessary to excuse their behaviour to-day. They
+must explain at least why they feel no remorse. No longer may one
+destroy a family of apes and boast of it afterwards. If the crime is
+mentioned publicly, its author is careful to observe that he so acted
+as a naturalist, no doubt that we may thus distinguish him from a man
+who would have done the same in the name of religion. We are sometimes
+advised that the value of a training in science is that it makes
+honesty of thought more usual than we find it in the ordinary man, who
+merely rationalises his desires; and for guidance we are directed to
+examine the sad mental results which come of a purely literary or a
+political training. We should like to believe this, yet when we find a
+zoölogist writing to the _Times_ to confess that he would have flinched
+from the slaughter of a certain rare and fragile creature had he not
+known that his deed was excused because it was committed in the name of
+a museum, then a confusion of thought, probably literary, compels us to
+suggest that science may be no better an apology for a blackguardly act
+than is rum-running; and we are not forgetting that some of the worst
+of man’s ferocities have been performed solemnly and with full ritual
+in the name of God.
+
+But the ethics of the hunt are not to be defined by men whose own
+boyhood was in the period when the rapid growth of factories and
+railways was causing a first wholesale clearance of wild life, both
+human and bestial, from the earth. We are too near to the raw trophies
+and benefits. That becomes clear, when, as we read in the news not long
+ago, American warships used live whales as targets for gun-practice.
+Makers of soap, too, would protest that it is right for commerce to
+send explosive harpoons into the same creatures, because the supply of
+fat is thereby increased. The matter is very difficult. Obviously if
+we want the land the buffaloes cannot have it, and if we want their
+oil the whales must part with it. The stage which Thoreau reached
+when he gave up fishing is several centuries ahead for most of us. My
+own notions about hunting would not bear a close inspection by either
+humanitarians or sportsmen. If one has heard only a rat whimper when an
+owl clutched it, and heard it continue to cry as the bird, with talons
+set vice-like, sat blinking leisurely in deep and complacent thought,
+then the scheme of things does seem a little sorry, though rats with
+their fleas are what they are. The scheme, too, includes liver-flukes
+and ticks. There are forms of life as deadly to man as he is to other
+animals. One’s right to kill is no more than one’s need and ability to
+kill. But if man brought compassion into the world, and bestows it on
+creatures other than his fellows, how did he come by it, and what may
+be its value in the evolution of life? Is it useless, like saintliness?
+
+
+XI
+
+The first officer, the only man in the ship who could converse freely
+with me in English, waved his hand as he went overside. He was going
+ashore to some friends. The shore of the island was just out of hailing
+distance. The setting sun was below the height of the land. The huts
+among the columns of the palms along the beach were becoming formless.
+Even by day our steamer, among those islands of Indonesia, gave me the
+idea that she was a vagrant from another and a coarser world. Land was
+nearly always in sight, but whether distant or close to our beam it
+might have been a vagary, the vaporous show of a kingdom with which
+we could have no contact. It would have no name. It had not been seen
+before. We were the first to see it, and the last. To-morrow some other
+shape would be there, or nothing. The only reality was our steamer and
+its Dutchman, chance blunderers into a region which was not for us.
+Even when the sun was over the ship, and the blaze on the deck was like
+exposure to a furnace, the coast in sight was but the filmy stuff of
+an hallucination.
+
+But now the sun was going, and in those seas that spectacle was always
+strangely disturbing. It was a celestial display which should have been
+accompanied by the rolling of thunder and the shaking of the earth.
+One watched for the sudden peopling of those far off and luminous
+battlements of the sky. But there was no sound. There was no movement.
+It was an empty display; we might have been surprised by the beginning
+of a rehearsal which was postponed. One could not help feeling the
+immanence of a revelation to men who now, open-mouthed, had paused in
+their foolish activities, and were waiting; and so it was astonishing,
+after that warning prelude, that only darkness should fall. We were
+reprieved. Perhaps Heaven did not know what to do with us.
+
+The pale huts receded into nothing. The black filigree of palm fronds
+above them dissolved in night. The smooth water of the anchorage
+vanished without a whisper. The day was done. In the alleyway on which
+my cabin opened a few electric sconces made solid a short walk, which
+was suspended with vague ends in the dark. The weight of a heated
+silence, in which there was no more to be discerned than that short
+promenade, fell over the ship. It was astonishing that she could be so
+quiet.
+
+In my cabin even an electric fan would have been a companion, but
+it would not work; it was dumb. The cabin was only a recess in
+solitude. Every book there had been read, and the advertisements in
+the newspapers, which were two months old, and had been used for
+packing. When I left London I took with me some clear and scientific
+advice about the collecting of insects. “Not butterflies and moths.”
+My instructions were specific. “Only diptera, hymenoptera, and bugs
+like these.” The bugs called “these” were exhibited and demonstrated in
+their British counterparts.
+
+It appeared that I might be of aid to a new study, which now is
+earnestly seeking an answer to the growing challenge of the insect
+world to man’s dominion of this earth. This quest was urged on me with
+cool insistence, careless of any suspicion I might have had that there
+may be, to an overseeing and directing mind unknown, worse pests than
+bugs on earth. I accepted the job, the tins, the pins, the forceps,
+the bottles, chemicals, nets and all, and submitted to a series of
+elementary lessons. I began with the feeling of a Jain in the matter;
+but at last was persuaded that I should be performing a social service,
+for I was reminded that a tse-tse fly could make as good an exhibit of
+me as ever man made of a gorilla.
+
+With some little entomological routine to be got through daily I began
+to understand why it was the Victorian naturalists showed a fortitude
+in adversity which, had they resolved, not on beetles but on something
+nobler, might have got them to Truth itself. On tropical days so
+searching that nothing but a sudden threat would have moved a man from
+where he happened to be resting, I picked up my net with alacrity,
+filled a little bag with bottles, and toiled to some place which, so
+the sun and wind told me, would make the shade of old Wallace eagerly
+readjust his ghostly spectacles as he watched me; and I saw clearly
+enough then that at an earlier age and with a stouter nerve I should
+have found fun in collecting record horns and tusks. It was usually
+in a secluded corner where I was alone; though once, near a Malay
+village in Celebes, in a clearing which had already become a tangled
+shrubbery again, I noticed at last a native, his krise in his sarong,
+sternly watching me. He stood like a threatening image, and whenever
+I glanced casually in his direction, which I did as often as dignity
+allowed, he still had that severe look. Presently I found that this
+area was a Mohammedan graveyard, for I tripped over one of the hidden
+stones while stealthily following the eccentric course of a fly which
+looked attractively malignant. The Malay stood over me as I pulled out
+some thorns with forced deliberation. He did not speak. He picked up a
+spare net, and spent the rest of the morning adding industriously to my
+collection.
+
+The close scrutiny of one patch of forest, into which direct sunlight
+fell, with the eye watchful for the slightest movement, gave one a
+notion of the density with which that apparently empty jungle was
+peopled. A biologist once said that most of the world’s protoplasm is
+locked up in the bodies of insects. You would think so when, having
+missed a miniature bogie with the net, you scrutinised the place where
+it had so miraculously disappeared. (Sometimes it was in a fold of the
+net all the time, discovered when it nailed a careless hand.)
+
+Nothing appears to be there but fronds and branches, yet as soon as the
+image of the object you missed begins to fade from your recollection,
+you see, sitting under a leaf, a robber fly eating a victim as large as
+itself. Near it is a big grasshopper so closely resembling the leaves
+and stem with which it is aligned that your sight is apt to take it in
+as a slow transmutation of the foliage. Touch him, and he shoots off
+like a projectile. His noisy flight betrays a number of things. They
+move, and then there they are. A shield bug, whose homeland cousins
+are hated by fruit-growers, moves uneasily in its place. You had
+supposed it was a coloured leaf-scar. Spiders and mantids run and drop.
+You mark the fall of one creature, and then are aware that a column
+of ants is marching through the dead leaves at your feet. Every inch
+appears to be occupied, where a casual glance would have seen nothing
+in the whole front of the woods.
+
+The mere collecting of these creatures is but a pastime, though it is
+easy enough to find species that are unknown to entomologists; yet of
+very few of those innumerable forms is the life-history known, though
+some of the little items of the forest prove disastrous, with acquired
+habits, in the plantations. Man quite easily displaces the tigers and
+their lairs, but it is more than likely that the little things, of
+which he has been contemptuous, may put up a more remarkable fight for
+a place in the sun than he will enjoy.
+
+When the ship was quiet at night, that was the time when the bottles
+were emptied, and the creatures were put into paper envelopes, with a
+place and date. The electric sconces outside at night made good hunting
+ground. Moths like translucent jewels reposed on them; but the luminous
+plaques were chiefly valuable as attractions for mosquitoes and some
+flies which would have been unbelievable even by day.
+
+One night, unable for a time to do more work because my hands were wet
+with sweat caused by my concentration on small and delicate objects, I
+looked up at some books facing me on the table. A creature with eyes
+like tiny orange glow lamps was sitting there watching me, its wings
+tremulous with energy.
+
+It was a moth, demi-octavo in size, and I became at once a little
+nervous in its presence. I assured it earnestly that moths were
+quite outside my instructions. Nevertheless, when I rose gently to
+inspect it, so desirable a beauty I had never seen before. It was jet
+black, body and wings, though its wings were marked sparsely with
+hieroglyphics in gold. Was it real? I got the net, and secured it
+neatly as it rose; brought a killing bottle--might I not have one such
+creature when Bates and Wallace slew their thousands?--and watched the
+captive where it quivered, though not in alarm, in a loose fold of the
+muslin. It was quiet, making a haze of its wings, at times checking
+them so that I could attempt a translation of its golden message. It
+had a face ... rather a large black face, in which those glowing eyes
+were very conspicuous.
+
+I took out the cork of the bottle, looked again at the quivering and
+fearsome beauty, and put back the cork and shoved the bottle away.
+It was impossible. It would have been worse than murder. They who
+destroy beauty are damned. I felt I did not want to be damned. That
+wonderful form, and the stillness, and the silence, overcame me. This
+creature was not mine. I freed the prisoner. It shot round the cabin,
+settled again on a book, and watched me, with its wings vibrating,
+until I had finished. A dim suspicion that it was more than a moth was
+inconsequential, but natural.
+
+
+XII
+
+The men who are under an infernal spell, a spell which our best
+political economists have proved cannot be and ought not to be broken,
+and who therefore must run to and fro between London and Croydon
+all their wretched lives, are astonished when an infant shows more
+initiative and ventures to New York. But why shouldn’t it? Its journey
+proved as easy as a perambulator and a nurse. There is nothing in being
+carried about. Where steamships and railways go anyone may go. You have
+only to take a seat, and wait. A child could travel in independence
+from here to Macassar, which is a mere name through distance, and it
+would but add interest to a long voyage for doting seamen. The
+trouble for a restless soul begins only when he would turn aside,
+and go where other people do not. Then he finds that the herd has no
+sympathy for one of its members who would leave the farmer’s field; no
+sympathy, no advice, no help; nothing but curt warnings and mocking
+prophecies.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _After a long and faithful adherence to the
+  beaten tracks you reach some distant coastal
+  outpost_--
+]
+
+After a long and faithful adherence to the beaten tracks you reach
+some distant coastal outpost, and, enforced, there you pause. There
+is nothing else to do, so you look inland to the hills. What do they
+hide? The exiles on the spot, through envy and jealousy--for it would
+be absurd to suppose that they do not want to lose you--deny all access
+to those hills. That outpost is touched by a steamer at least once a
+fortnight, and while waiting for it, each evening, when the other men
+are as idle as yourself, you ask disturbing questions about the land
+beyond, The men reclining about the room murmur that nobody ever goes.
+Some day, of course, before they return home, they intend to stand on
+those hills. Just once. Wants a bit of doing, though. Pretty bad, the
+fevers. Can’t trust the natives. Last year a young fellow, just out, he
+tried it. Thought we didn’t know. Wouldn’t listen to us. Said he would
+be back in a week. He isn’t back yet. And there was a Dutchman once....
+Heard about him? Well. The sagacious informant here glances round to
+see who is present, and leans over to whisper, ending his story with a
+malignant chuckle. “And served him right, too.”
+
+If you listened to those fellows in complete social credulity you
+would merely stay at the rest-house till the next ship anchored, and
+when she departed so would you, still gazing at the unknown over her
+taffrail. But she has not arrived yet, and therefore every day, as you
+look to the hills, you explore a path which leads, so it seems, to
+those ramparts of cobalt. You have not the cheerful idea, of course, of
+continuing long enough. That would show courage instead of sociability.
+You merely wish to gratify, as much as a quiet creature dare, an
+intolerable desire to approach the forbidden.
+
+Then, in some manner, those hills vanish. After five minutes on that
+track they go. An illusion? You continue till you reach a secluded
+valley, a steep and narrow place about which nobody has warned you,
+though to warn a friend of it, in case he should stray that way by
+chance, seems at a glance to be a positive duty. You watch a river come
+down turbulently through woods as dark and still as night. It goes over
+rocks, but with hardly a sound, as though it were muffled. A native
+crouches on the coiled roots of a tree on the opposite shore, and
+eyes you. But he does not move his head. He says nothing. He continues
+to watch you, and he does not move. Is it possible to get beyond that
+point? Very likely not. The very hills have disappeared. That dark
+forest, if it is not impenetrable, would be better if it were. The land
+is only a dream, and that native is the warning figure in it. You shout
+over to the figure, but it does not answer. It looks away. So you turn
+back, listen to more stories for a few more nights in the rest-house,
+and leave with the next ship.
+
+There is the island of Celebes. Ships go to it direct from England. A
+child could manage the journey thither. I could not count the number
+of villages of its coast off which anchored my local trading steamer;
+we stood in and out of Celebes for weeks. I sought for a man who could
+tell me about the interior of that island--which has about the same
+area as Ireland, but a coastline long enough for an archipelago--but
+never found him. Picture post-cards may be obtained at Macassar and
+Menado, and trips by motor-car bought for as far as the roads go. But
+Brighton has the same advantages. Yet when it came to the question
+of a journey into the interior, then you might as well have been in
+a London post-office appealing through the wire netting, to a young
+lady counting insurance stamps, for a way to send a message to Joanna
+Southcott about that box. Yet there cannot be another large island
+anywhere in the world with shores so inviting, because those of
+Celebes are uninhabited, except for short lengths; and the mountains
+of the interior of that island, which is crossed by the equator, are
+so fantastic that they might be hiding the wonders of all outlandish
+legends. No matter. There is no approach, apparently, to the heights.
+A spell is on the place. You must be content to watch that coast and
+those hills pass, unless you are more daring than this deponent in
+flaunting the settled ways and opinions of your fellow-men.
+
+The time does come, it does come, when you can stand the charted paths
+no longer. It is all very well for the people at home, misled by the
+narratives of flamboyant tourists, to suppose that the track you are
+following is one only for the stout of heart. By the map, doubtless, it
+looks as though it were. But you know better. The chief difficulty on
+that track, however devious and far it may seem from London, is that
+you cannot get away from it. While this is strictly true, it must be
+remembered that it is not altogether a simple excursion for a wayfarer
+to leave the highways and cross alone and in safety some of the moors
+of England. The warnings of the friends with whom you consort for
+a few days at a rest-house in the tropics merit attention. There is
+something in what they say.
+
+At last you are in no doubt about it. If the warning fables were only
+half as bad as the reality still the common path could hold you no
+longer. Boredom with the ways of Labuan is no different from boredom
+in Highgate. With deliberation you cast your luggage into a godown,
+careless whether or not you ever see it again, and set out light-foot
+for the unknown quarter where health is the only fortune, and where all
+the money in the world cannot buy refreshment when it does not exist,
+nor goodwill from creatures who do not like your face. If your good
+luck or common sense prove inadequate, then you are aware you won’t
+return; but there is satisfaction to be found in the certain knowledge
+that if you have to pay the ultimate forfeit it will be because you
+ought to pay it. You cannot find that satisfaction in London, which
+is in many ways worse than the jungle. If you prove good enough, the
+wild will reward you with a safe passage; but the city will even punish
+qualities which make men honest citizens and pleasant neighbours.
+
+In weeks of toil you get far beyond the last echo of the coast. You can
+imagine you have reached, not another place, but another time, and
+have entered an earlier age of the earth. Soon after the beginning of
+the journey up country there was a suspicion, when another silent reach
+of the river opened, where immense trees overhung and were motionless,
+and were doubled in the mirror, that now you were about to wake up.
+This would go. In reality you were not there.
+
+The paddlers ceased. A buffalo, a bronze statue on a strip of sand in
+the water, stared at the lot of you as you rounded the point. Then he
+erupted that scene. It did exist; it was alive. The first ripple from
+the outer world had come to stir into protest that timeless peace.
+
+The river is left, and a traverse made of the forest. Ranges are
+crossed. You become a little doubtful of your whereabouts. The map
+treasured in a rubber bag now abandons you to an indeterminate land.
+The natives are shy, food is scarce and a little queer, and exposure
+and wounds recall to the memory the unfriendly yarns of the settlement
+far away. About time to turn back? But the inclination is to go on, for
+the days seem brighter and more innocent than you have ever known them
+to be. Even food has become an enjoyable way to continue life; and the
+camp at sundown, when, offering grace for the pleasure of conscious
+continuance in fatigue, you look upwards to a fading stratum of gold
+on the roof of the jungle across the stream, and the cicadas begin
+their pæan, is richer than success. The very smell of the wood smoke
+is a luxury. Only at night, when the darkness is so well established
+that it could be the irrevocable end of all the days, and the distant
+sounds in the forest are inexplicable if they are not menacing, do the
+thoughts turn backward. It would be easier, you think then, to be safe.
+
+But the next day you discover that you are not alone in that unknown
+country. A man meets you, and says that he has heard you were about.
+He has been trying to find you. He would like to hear a bit of news.
+He behaves to you as though you were the best friend he had. You learn
+that he has been there for nearly a year. He came to that corner of the
+continent from the other side. He says this as though he were merely
+remarking that it rained yesterday; and the extraordinary character
+of such a journey causes you to glance at him for some clue to the
+reason for so obvious a lie. Yet no, that fellow is not a liar--not in
+such a small matter, anyhow. What is he doing there? Oh, just looking
+round for gold, or tin, or a job. Have you heard a word, he asks, of a
+railway coming along?
+
+You cannot journey to any unusual quarter without surprising there
+one of these wanderers. He is looking a country over, and has lived
+with the chief’s daughter, and improved the chief’s importance with
+neighbouring tribes, and has kept open a wary eye for gold or anything
+else which might be lying about, long before regular communication was
+made with the sea, and years ahead of the bold explorers about whom the
+newspapers make such a fuss; he saw the land before the missionaries.
+These wanderers make rough maps of their own, they are familiar with
+the most unlikely recesses of the land--which they reached, by the way,
+from China, or Uganda, or Bogota, or wherever they were last. If one
+of them tells you his name you need not believe him. The place of his
+birth is not the place of his confidence. It is no good asking him what
+he is going to do next, for he does not know. While you are with him,
+you feel that a better companion for such a country was never born; and
+when you leave him you know you will never see him again, nor even hear
+of him. But he is a man you will never forget.
+
+
+XIII
+
+There was an island, which must have evaporated with the morning
+mists like other promising things, called Bragman. It is recorded
+by Maundeville, and he had positive knowledge that on Bragman was
+“no Thief, nor Murderer, nor common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever
+was Man slain in that Country. And because they be so true and so
+righteous, and so full of good conditions, they were never grieved
+with Tempests, nor with Thunder, nor with Lightning, nor with Hail,
+nor with Pestilence, nor with War, nor with Hunger, nor with any other
+Tribulation, as we be, many Times, amongst us, for our Sins.”
+
+The fascination of islands is felt by all of us, but Bragman might
+not be to everybody’s taste. Some people might say it would have no
+taste. They would prefer an infested attic in Rotherhithe or Ostend,
+or any mean refuge with sufficient sin about it to prove they were
+alive and in danger of hell fire. Yet for others it would certainly
+give a sense of rest from the many advantages of Europe. They might
+feel that for the sake of peace they could endure it. What is more, we
+know that the pleasures of sin can be ridiculously overrated. The most
+doleful places in the world, where youth seeking joy in bright-eyed
+recklessness is sure to be soused in ancient and unexpected gloom, are
+what are known to the feeble-minded and to writers of moral tracts as
+“haunts of pleasure.” Nobody points out to the eager and guileless,
+who have been misled by the glamour which literature can cast over
+even a bath-room, and by the lush reminiscences of dodderers, that for
+gaiety of atmosphere the red lights of the places of pleasure are quite
+extinguished by the attractions of a temperance hotel on a wet night.
+The haunts of pleasure take their place in the museum of mankind’s
+mistakes alongside the glories of war.
+
+That island of Maundeville’s, which is called Bragman, is only a
+curious name for one of the Hesperides, or the Fortunate Isles, or the
+Isles of the Blessed. Some name it Eden or Elysium. We place it where
+we will, and give it the name of our choice. But naturally it must be
+an island, uncontaminated by the proximity of a mainland. Every man
+has his dream of such a sanctuary, and every community its legend,
+because in our hearts we are sure the world is not good enough for us.
+Even the South Sea Islanders have word of a better place, the asylum
+they have never reached in all their thousand years of wandering from
+east to west about the Pacific. Perhaps man goes to war, or seeks
+pleasure with abandonment, merely because at intervals he becomes
+desperately disappointed in his search for what is not of this earth.
+What does that suggest? But we will leave the suggestion to the
+metaphysicians, who are as interesting when at such speculations as
+the fourteenth century cartographers were at geography. It may mean
+something highly important, but what that is we are never likely to see
+as we see daylight when the generalization of a mathematical genius
+illuminates and relates the apparently irrelevant speculations of his
+arduous but unimaginative fellows. If we would see the turrets of the
+Holy City, then a stroll round the corner to the Dog and Duck before
+closing-time may do as well as a longer journey. We only know that
+all the supreme artists appear to have been privileged, as was Moses,
+with a sight of a coast, glorious but remote, and that the memory of
+that unattainable vision gives to their music and verse the melancholy
+and the golden sonority which to us, and we do not know why, are the
+indisputable sigil of their greatness.
+
+[Illustration: _Some name it Eden or Elysium._]
+
+“To reach felicity,” says Mr. Firestone in his _Coasts of Illusion_,
+“we must cross the water.” There is no reason for this, but we know
+it is true, for felicity is where we are not. We must cross it to an
+island, and a small one. A large island would be useless. It ought
+to be uninhabited, too, or at the worst it should be very rarely
+boarded by other wanderers. What account could the company of the
+_Hispaniola_ have rendered of the pirates’ hoard if they had sought it
+on a mainland? Where would Robinson Crusoe be now if his island had
+been Australia? Lost among the dry records of geographical discovery.
+A large island could not hold the treasure we are after. I remember
+a shape on the horizon, which often was visible from a Devonshire
+vantage, though sometimes it had gone. Its nature depended, I thought,
+on the way of the sun and wind. It was a cloud. It was very distant.
+It was a whale. It was my imagination. But one morning at sunrise I
+put my head out of the scuttle of a little cutter, and the material
+universe had broken loose. The tiny ship was heaving on a groundswell,
+vast undulations of glass, and over us titanic masonry was toppling
+in ruin--I feared the explosions of surf would give a last touch to a
+collapsing island, and Lundy would fall on us. We landed on a beach no
+larger than a few bushels of shingle. It was enclosed by green slopes
+and high walls of rock; and we climbed a track from the beach that
+mounted amid sunlight and shadow. The heat of the upper shimmering
+platform of granite and heath above the smooth sea, and its smell and
+look of antiquity, suggested that it had been abandoned and forgotten,
+and had remained apart from the affairs of a greater and more
+important world since the creation. We were sundered from everybody.
+That was my first island, and I still think its one disadvantage is
+that it is only twelve miles offshore.
+
+For perhaps an island landfall should come only after a long and
+uncertain voyage. Its coast must appear in a way which suggests as an
+absurdity that the captain could have performed a miracle with such
+casual exactitude. This landfall is a virgin gift to us by chance.
+Indeed most small islands, when lifted by a ship, have that suggestion
+about them. That is why they are the origin of the better legends of
+man, and the promise of earthly felicity. They are the dream surprised
+in daylight on the ocean by the voyager, caught napping in the sun, and
+we know that a foot set on those impalpable colours would wake the gods
+to their forgetfulness, and away the spectre would go. Not for us. That
+is why the ship always sails past.
+
+
+XIV
+
+Let something survive on earth, if it be only the record of
+Maundeville’s island, which humanity cannot violate. I am glad
+Amundsen returned safely, but I am glad also because the North Pole
+compelled even our wonderful aeroplanes to treat it with respect.
+Without guessing what our trouble is, we may be growing too clever.
+Our very boldness may hide that fact from us. It would be a pity if
+the earth became tired of us, as once it grew weary of the dinosaurs,
+who appear to have overdone their part. They grew too big. A traveller
+who recently returned from the upper Amazon asks, for instance, what
+the future of that region is to be. “Unless oil,” says this gentleman,
+“renews interest in this part of the world, large sections may revert
+to savagery, as for instance in the Upper Napo, where already the
+rubber gatherers have withdrawn, and the Indian tribes who once
+occupied the territory have returned to their original haunts.” Clearly
+then the Indian tribes must once have deserted their original haunts.
+Was that because of the rubber gatherers? However, these savages
+may be compelled again to leave their original haunts. The explorer
+suggests that the forest trees could be readily converted into alcohol;
+though he adds that not much can be done without better transport, and
+his idea is that the use of flying boats, or hydroplanes, a use he
+describes as “intelligent,” would in that wasted region “make things
+possible which otherwise would be out of the question.” And then, to
+show that this beneficent development is really in the air, and may
+blossom soon, he reports that the Murato Indians of the Pastazo River
+have a curious saying. They say, “When the white man comes with wings
+we are going to die.”
+
+We never doubt that what has been revealed only to the superior race
+of whites--or as Mr. E. M. Forster describes us, the “pinko-greys”--is
+better than any idea of an inferior colour. Alcohol and pulp, to our
+mind, are the better forms for trees, their spiritual transmutation
+as it were, and death in flying machines more desirable than what we
+call savagery. The white man with his burden feels that he has not
+reconciled himself to his god unless he has converted a mountain or
+a wood into something like Widnes or Dowlais. When the mountain is a
+mass of slag on which a community crowds into back-to-back hovels,
+living there in the sure and certain hope of the Poor Law as the crown
+to its labours, the man of western culture looks at the figures in
+a Blue-Book, and knows that he has fulfilled the divine injunction.
+He never suspects that he may be wrong in that. Impossible that the
+Murato Indians in their forest may be as pleasing as his flying
+machines and alcohol! Yet perhaps the firs and pines of Newfoundland
+are not necessarily worse than the rolls of paper into which they are
+converted. The conversion of a forest into a popular press may be
+inevitable, like war, but we should not deride the trees which help us
+to our enlightenment by calling them savage. That seems hardly fair.
+Let the Murato and all other Indians perish, if there is no other
+way of getting our alcohol, but to say they are uncivilized as we
+extinguish them seems a little priggish.
+
+And so our regret is not moved as easily as it ought to be when we
+remember that the pioneer heroes who will venture to convert that
+Amazon solitude into oil and other commodities may, nay will, die
+in numbers of various fevers, along with the Indians who will die
+because of other things. That is not unjust. For we feel that the
+transformation of all the world into the likeness of the industrious
+Black Country need not be hastened on our account. There is a tributary
+of the Amazon I know, which once rewarded my admiration for it with
+some fever, but I do not want it to be punished into the likeness of
+the factories and slime of the Lea at Stratford-by-Bow. I shall never
+again see that river and its forest, but it is a pleasure to remember
+that, beyond Whitehall and Versailles, there still it flows between its
+cliffs of foliage, for whoever would like a complete change from the
+best that man has thought and done, and is willing to pay the price
+for it. The explorer of the Amazon who wondered whether it could be
+translated into a favourable balance sheet, says, “Alone in these dense
+green solitudes, harmless as they may appear, it is the unknown, the
+unseen, that terrifies. Man feels that he is battling with an invisible
+monster more horrible than the river, because the latter attacks in
+the open and its death stroke is relatively quick, whereas the forest
+ensnares its victim in the dark, and slowly draws its coils tighter,
+till death comes as a merciful relief.” But that, of course, is only
+the impression of a human creature in such a land who is not a forest
+Indian, and finds himself unable to call up a taxicab at the moment he
+needs it. To alcohol with the place! The truth is the forest was not
+meant for him. Whatever its design, it was not that. It does not wish
+to do him any harm; and though its countenance has the appearance of
+it, yet it was not composed as a look of doom. If he cannot survive,
+however, then he must die, and while he is dying it will maintain its
+aloofness and silence.
+
+So I am glad when the North Pole turns back our aeroplanes. The day
+will come when they will land there, no doubt. A quantity of black
+grease, our mark of trade, will be left on the snow, as evidence that
+man at last has come. But it is just as certain that he will not stay
+there. Nothing can be done with that place, and it will be left to
+stare in white emptiness at the stars. We find some comfort, which need
+not be pure misanthropic lunacy, in the thought of unprofitable deserts
+and waste lands. Some parts of earth, we are assured, will remain
+exempt forever from the blight of our appalling activities. Let us pray
+for more power to the mosquito’s elbow on the Amazon and such places.
+It is pleasant to remember that he is guarding those regions against
+saw mills and plant for distilling alcohol from the pulp of the forest.
+Another sort of traveller, Mr. Norman Douglas, made this confession in
+a review he wrote of that noble travel narrative, Doughty’s _Arabia
+Deserta_--for I would prefer a little society in this misanthropy.
+I do not want to be solitary in my desert. Says Mr. Douglas, with
+feeling, “I recall my first view of the Chott country, that sterile
+salt depression in Tunisia, and my feelings of relief at the idea that
+this little speck of the globe, at least, was irreclaimable for all
+time; never to be converted into arable land, or even pasture; safe
+from the intrusion of potato planters and what not; the despair of the
+politician, the delight of any dreamer who might care to people its
+melancholy surface with phantoms, mere illusions, of his own.”
+
+I sing with him, Hosanna! A great region of South Africa is sinking
+into a like melancholy surface, for which we may thank whatever
+desiccating Power there may be. It is returning to the dust. Its
+water is leaving it. Its stones are now unturned. Its prospect is the
+deceptive mirage. So kingdoms of Central Asia, once the arenas for the
+battle glories of turbulent Huns and Tartars, have got tired of us, and
+now turn to the moon her own aspect of parched and shining dunes. And
+there is that part of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter--the Great Red
+Desert. What a name that is, the Empty Quarter! It is as satisfying to
+the mind as the Canadian Barren Grounds, a name so much more moving in
+its implications than all the statistics of the Wheat Belt.
+
+
+XV
+
+The traveller was homeward bound, and his liner made its landfall,
+and turned for Portland and its London pilot. There was no welcome in
+that look of the coast of home. The shadow of land to port might have
+been the end of all the headlands of the seas. It was as desolate as
+antiquity by twilight. There was no rain, but the chill cut to the
+bone. The sky was old and dark. This frown of the north-land subdued
+the comfortable life of the ship; it fled below. The little cheerful
+groups dissolved without a word. The decks were deserted, except for
+two odd figures, muffled like mummies in a shelter on the lee side. He
+could find nobody who would face it with him. He strolled aft to the
+shelter where some men who knew the East used to meet, before dinner,
+to smoke and yarn, but only a steward was there, a disillusioned
+familiar who was brusquely piling the unwanted wicker chairs--throwing
+them at each other.
+
+Somehow even the satin-wood panelling of the stairway to the saloon,
+with its bronze balustrade, appeared now to be out of place. It did
+not accord with cold draughts. The glow lamps shone in emptiness, the
+palms in the corners were dingy. He suspected the life of the ship had
+suddenly absented itself, and was behind closed doors, whispering of
+a crisis to which he could get no clue. As he descended to his cabin
+he paused to watch an officer, muffled in a greatcoat, pass from one
+side of the ship to the other on a deck above him, but the man was
+pre-occupied and hurried, and did not notice that the ship had another
+lonely ghost wandering about her.
+
+In his cabin the little gilt image of a Buddha, Putai Ho-Shang, the
+god of children and earthly joys, passive and happy, regarded him
+cheerfully from the clothes chest. That token of the East had more sun
+in it than all the world into which the steamer had now come. The image
+was old, perhaps as old as that fading recollection of a land along
+which the ship was now cruising for haven. Might not that recollection
+fade utterly before the haven was reached? Was that image cheerful
+with tidings that were nearer to the springs of life than anything
+known under the skies of the north? Was it that knowledge which made it
+confident? There was a suggestion of derision about its happy smile,
+as though it had a word which made it invulnerable to this bleak air,
+and to the driving darkness that was the headlong confusion of a region
+which had lost its light and faith.
+
+The bugle called to dinner. He took no notice of it. He thought he
+would sooner pack up; at least he could then confirm, putting away
+some good things he had found in Brunei, Palembang, and Canton, that
+somewhere life was ardent and young, and was light-hearted while making
+beautiful things. He placed a porcelain bowl beside Buddha. The two
+were worth looking at. If you stood in a certain way a golden dragon
+was hinted in the azure of the bowl. The man who made that did not work
+in a north-east wind. When he opened his camphorwood chest it filled
+his cabin with a suggestion of warm nights, of a still sea in which
+the reflections of the stars were comets rising from the deeps, of the
+figures of motionless palms drowsing with their heads above a beach.
+Well, that was over. But he had seen it. Time, now, to put it away,
+except as a private thought.
+
+But, as he packed away his silks and porcelain the image steadfastly
+quizzed him. That token of another order of things reclined
+luxuriously, as if asking him what he was going to do about it,
+though knowing he could give no answer. He put away everything but
+the image. He left that in the seat it had occupied all the voyage.
+He would not touch that yet. The voyage was not quite over. That idol
+was like an assurance of good. It might be the sign of a wisdom which
+understood all that he knew, and yet still could contemplate affairs
+with equanimity, though the sun and the lotus were far away. The image
+was completely foreign, as incongruous in a ship as he himself would be
+in a temple; yet you could believe that Putai Ho-Shang was in a place
+his philosophy comprehended, though that place was chill and cold to
+him; that in his cheerful mind every extension of the mechanics of
+industrial progress was provided for, and all the important devices of
+the busy men who motived that machinery. It would appear as simple to
+him as the acts of children. He would know all about it, and the end
+to which it was destined.
+
+The face of the little Cockney steward was at his elbow, with its
+sardonic smile. “Your tea, sir. We’re nearly in.”
+
+“Where are we?”
+
+“Just orf Southend. Fine morning, sir. The pier’s plain.”
+
+It certainly was a fine morning. The captain passed him on the deck.
+“Hullo, here we are again. Looks good, doesn’t it? We’ve done nicely,
+too. She came along last night like a scalded cat, though there was
+just an off-chance we missed the tide. We’re going up on top of it all
+right.”
+
+Was that Essex? No land in the East ever had a brighter sparkle. This
+place was not only alive, but boisterous. It was as young as a star.
+Their liner was slipping past a collier with a noise of brisk waters
+which was startling to one who had just left the quiet seclusion of a
+cabin. The river and its men were about their business. Great ships
+were moving quickly on a river that was spacious and resplendent. The
+very sunlight seemed dangerous, with its swift gleaming in a lively
+breeze. That challenging shouting from a sailing barge was the voice
+of a young and vigorous land. To that land morning was native; and
+full tide, pouring with bustling winds and floods of sudden light,
+made merely the pulse of it. He got the impression that the globe was
+spinning almost too buoyantly. Gravesend was soon ahead of them, a
+touch of smoking rose. He dived below, at something like a speed proper
+to this newly discovered land, to see whether or not his baggage had
+gone out for the Customs inspection. It had gone. No time had been
+lost, and even while he looked round his cabin he saw from his port
+light that the liner was slowing ... she had anchored.
+
+No hurry. Nobody would be waiting for him; not at that hour of the
+morning. He idled outside. The long vista of the lower deck was vacant.
+Eh? As he looked aft a tall figure turned into it, leisurely and
+confident, glancing in curiosity about the ship, a figure that was
+familiar, yet changed by time. Was that his own boy?
+
+The stranger strolled along and saw him. “Hullo, dad!” And then
+flushed, and was shy. “She’s a topping ship, isn’t she? I watched her
+coming up the river. She looked fine. Where’s your cabin?”
+
+They went into it. “The luggage is all set out on the other end of the
+ship. I came over in the tug with the Customs Officers. They tried to
+turn me out. What a jolly cabin. I like this. And what’s that funny
+smell, like spice? I wish I’d been with you.”
+
+They stood looking at each other intently, asking questions, forgetful
+of time. The boy, smiling and confident, like an assurance of good,
+regarded him cheerfully from a superior height.
+
+“Here, my lad. Time we were off. There’s a special train for the
+passengers. Come along, and talk afterwards.”
+
+The boy gave a quiet look round. “Here, is this yours?” He grinned, and
+picked up the image of Putai Ho-Shang. “What a comic little chap! Is he
+yours? Righto!” He put Buddha in his pocket.
+
+
+
+
+II. OUT OF TOUCH
+
+
+We could go no further. Our steamer had left the sea weeks before, and
+had slowly serpentined her way into the heart of a continent. She had
+been persuaded over bars, she had waited patiently till floods gave her
+a chance to insinuate herself against the river current still deeper
+into that forest of the tropics. She had rounded bends so narrowly
+that her crew cheered derisively when her gear brought down showers of
+leaves and twigs from the overhanging front of the forest. When the
+monkeys answered our syren the bo’sun gave me a look, half appealing,
+half startled. But now we could go no further. We were nearly two
+thousand miles from the sea, and just ahead of us was an incline of
+foaming water. No ship had intruded into that solitude before; beyond
+the cataracts ahead of us, up into the unexplored wilderness, that
+river had its origin somewhere in the Andes of Bolivia.
+
+There we anchored. Both anchors were out, because two were necessary.
+It was doubted that two were enough. Mr. Bullock, the mate, was
+complaining bitterly. I was standing with him on the forecastle
+head, and we were both watching the taut cables, which at times were
+tremulous in the strain of the current. “A nice thing,” he said, “a
+nice thing. Ever see anything like it before? It isn’t right.”
+
+What he was pointing to was certainly unusual. It is not right, or at
+least it is most irregular, for forest rubbish to gather in such a mass
+against a ship’s cables that the danger of something coming adrift is
+evident. “Ever see anything like it? Eh? I bet you haven’t, mister. It
+isn’t right. Trees and bamboos and meadows--a whole raft of it, like
+a day in the country. All it wants is a few cows. And what’s going to
+happen if she drags, in this place? No steam and the damned jungle
+under our counter. We should have to rot here, mister, for we’d never
+get her off. We’re out of touch of everything civilised.”
+
+So it seemed. Not only were great trees caught against the cables, but
+the trees were in green leaf. They were clouds of leaves, and perhaps
+birds were still perched in them. A few acres of top-heavy forest had
+collapsed into the river the night before, and there it was, or what
+was left of it, verdant and dense. No doubt more of it was to come.
+
+“That’s a new job for a sailor,” commented Mr. Bullock. “Clearing away
+a copse from a ship’s bows. I shall have to get a boat away to see to
+that.”
+
+An area of the tangle, a stretch of meadow and a height of foliage,
+became agitated, and detached itself in the pull of the stream as
+we watched. It foundered a little, uplifted again, pivoted in a
+half-circle, came free, and went swiftly by the length of the ship, a
+travelling island. Behind it swam a peccary.
+
+“There you are,” exclaimed the excited mate. “What did I tell you?
+Pigs, mister. We’ll get the whole farmyard in a minute.”
+
+Next morning the surrounding forest seemed to have gone. We had nothing
+but an opaque silence about us. The vapours of the miasmic solitude
+shrouded the high palisades of trees and leaves. Somewhere the sun
+had just risen, and the mist was luminous. Imperceptibly the white
+steam rose, till the bottom of the forest across the water was plain.
+The jungle looked as though it were sheered off a few feet above the
+bank in a straight line. But the curtain rose quickly as I watched. To
+starboard again was the towering and ominous barrier of still leaves
+and fronds, the place where no man had ever landed. The sun looked at
+us. Languor fell over the ship. The parrots and the monkeys cried
+aloud for a minute or two, and then the day became silent. It was no
+place for a ship. That was an unpleasant word of the mate’s, that
+we should rot. The sensation in that heated stillness, where there
+was nothing for us to do but to wait, was certainly of ferment and
+stagnation. The ironwork of the steamer felt like the plates of an oven.
+
+On the poop, under an awning, the steward was spreading our breakfast.
+The captain appeared, a slim and stooping figure in white linen and a
+Panama hat, and walked towards me, fingering his grey beard as he eyed
+things about him. He did not wear the expression of a man who would
+respond to a hearty “good-morning.” He rested his hands on the bulwark,
+and looked overside, contemplating the stream. He stopped by the open
+door of the chief’s cabin, and wondered to the engineer whether it
+might not be wise to rig a dam round the rudder, so that wreckage
+might not get entangled with the propeller. It was at that moment that
+pandemonium broke out in the bunkers. The noise rose through a bunker
+hatch, which was open for ventilation; yells, clanging of shovels,
+crow-bars ringing on bulkheads, shouts, and hysterical laughter. The
+chief came out in his pyjamas, and the three of us peered down into
+the twilight below.
+
+The chief bawled commands to his men. There was no answer. The infernal
+scuffling and clanging below went on. Then as suddenly it stopped. The
+chief cried down peremptorily, and the stokers heard him. One of them
+appeared below us, a blackened gnome, his dirty mask veined with pink
+where the sweat ran. He was panting. When he saw the stern faces above
+him he showed a broad white smile.
+
+“All right, sir, we’ve done him in. Took some doin’, though.”
+
+“What the hell do you mean? What’s this row about?”
+
+The man vanished. Some whispering went on under the deck. Then several
+stokers appeared, hauling on a rope. It had a great snake at the end of
+it, its head limp, its body gashed. The hilarious stokers kicked and
+shoved the dead twelve feet of it into coils which we could inspect
+from above.
+
+“There you are, sir,” said one of the showmen. “That’s it. All
+right to find that in the coal, ain’t it? You ought to have seen
+the way he scrapped.... And don’t forget we didn’t sign on to kill
+boa-constrictors, sir,” added a quiet voice, from the dark.
+
+“I don’t wonder at it,” said the mate at breakfast. “Crawled in by a
+hawse pipe, of course. The ship will get full of ’em, with that green
+stuff about the cables.”
+
+“Glad to hear it. That will give us some occupation, captain,” our
+surgeon commented. “Otherwise, we should be dull here.” The surgeon’s
+mind was inclined to curiosity in wayward things, and he always kept a
+butterfly-net handy. “One of the men this morning showed me a wound on
+his elbow. It was hard to stop the bleeding. He didn’t know how he got
+it, and I didn’t tell him. But there are vampire bats in the fo’cas’le.”
+
+The captain gave an impatient exclamation, and blamed the surgeon for
+frivolity. “Bats! Vampire bats! You talk like a novelist, doctor. Never
+heard of bats in a fo’cas’le. You’re thinking of belfries.”
+
+The surgeon chuckled. “You’ll hear all right, captain, when the men
+find out.”
+
+The captain grumbled through all the meal. Place didn’t smell like a
+ship, smelt like a hothouse. Nice place to be in. In all his years at
+sea, nothing like it. Another charter like this, and the owner could
+look after his boa-constrictors himself. “Mr. Mate, just keep the men
+from thinking too much about it. A good time now to get some of that
+work done.”
+
+For me after breakfast, with the decorative office of supercargo, there
+was no work. There was only the forest to look at, the yellow flood
+with its flotsam, and the river ahead tumultuous and gleaming in the
+rapids. The heat increased. The silence was a heavy weight. One felt a
+little fearful because so much forest made no sound whatever, no more
+sound than if it had been a dream, not a murmur nor the rustle of a
+leaf. It was quite still, like an illusion of trees. We might have made
+a ridiculous escape to the world’s end, and now were a little scared,
+not knowing what to make of it.
+
+The only movement was the tumult of the cataracts, a glittering and
+flashing about a mass of black rocks. But that gave no sense that
+water was falling, but only that it was inclined, for its pour never
+ended. Beyond those rapids there was nothing; only trees and the sun.
+Nobody had ever been there. There was no reason why a man should go.
+The parapet of the cataracts, where black triangles of waves above our
+heads continually leaped but never seemed to descend, was the edge of
+the world. While I was gazing at that line of leaping waves, which
+stretched between the high barriers of the forest, the figure of a man
+appeared there. He poised for an instant on the verge, in the centre
+of the line, against the sky, arms stretched out as if in appeal, and
+then vanished in the spray below.
+
+“See that?” exclaimed the chief. He hurried along to me. “See him? That
+must have been an Indian. Couldn’t stop himself, there. Can you see him
+now?”
+
+We could not. We could see only the incline of heaving water. We must
+have been mistaken, and were beginning to argue about it when an object
+came slowly away from the foot of the falls. It was an overturned
+canoe. A swimmer righted it, got in, and began to paddle towards us.
+
+The man came alongside, standing up in his scallop, stark naked, a
+paddle in his hand, grinning. I thought he must be of some unnamed
+tribe. He was a little lighter in colour than an Indian, but his curly
+black hair and beard made him remarkably different. The natives never
+have beards, though that difference was not so astonishing as his
+light-hearted grin, which was absurdly familiar in that laughless and
+inhuman wild. He did not speak, but airily waved his hand as he came
+alongside, and grabbed our Jacob’s ladder. Up he came, in leisured
+nonchalance.
+
+“Pardon me,” he said, as he stood up before our gaping company of
+seamen still smiling, and his fine body glistening. “Anybody lend me a
+pair of pants?”
+
+Our captain was frowning at him in wonder, but at that he grimaced.
+“Come aft,” he said. The brown figure nodded to us in good humour,
+and followed the captain, stepping like a god. He turned, as he was
+about to descend the companion, and gazed at our house-flag. You may
+see profiles like his in any collection of Greek antiquities. When he
+had gone we leaned overside to stare at his dug-out canoe, hitched to
+our ladder. There was nothing in it but some arrows and a bow, and a
+machete, all lashed to a peg.
+
+The stranger, that night, came with the chief to my cabin. He inspected
+our books with evident enjoyment. “Books!” he said. “Books, eh!”
+
+“You know,” he continued looking round at us, “I thought I’d gone
+light-headed when I saw your ship below the falls. I was so surprised
+that a jerk sent me over side, and I came down the rapids with an arm
+over the canoe. I was sure I was going to miss meeting you after all.
+Too bad!”
+
+He gave us his name. It was that of a learned English judge. I reminded
+him of that. “Oh, yes. My father. He’d have been amused if he’d seen me
+this morning. Is he all right?”
+
+He was quite cool about it. This sort of thing, I gathered from his
+manner, might happen to anybody. “Never expected to meet Christians at
+a place like this.”
+
+Where had he come from? “Mollendo,” he replied, rolling a cigarette.
+
+Was the man a liar? Mollendo was a thousand miles away on the Pacific
+side. The Andes were between us. The youngster saw our doubt, and
+smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Mollendo. And I crossed the Andes, though
+don’t you do it unless you want to. This side of them I lost my gun.
+Lost everything. Got a canoe and some arrows and a bow, and here I am.
+You know,” he went on, “you can shoot fish with an arrow. I’ll show you
+in the morning. That’s how I lived, when I wasn’t with the natives.”
+
+“Is that all?” I asked. I thought of the rumours of cannibals and
+head-hunters, and the stories of what was in store for those who
+ventured alone into the region beyond us.
+
+“Well,” he said, taking down a book to see what it was, “well ... it
+took some months. It’s a bad country. But I say! Fancy your knowing my
+dad. I thought I was quite out of touch here.”
+
+
+
+
+III. ELYSIUM
+
+
+That garden, which sloped seaward to three areca palms, was a place
+which I felt might vanish, if I moved, or changed my thoughts. The
+daylight was the private illumination of an imagined land, and the
+strange fronds were a capricious revolt from the conventions of avenues
+and parks. Then a butterfly, immense in green and black, broke into the
+picture from above, and fanned his colours slowly over a white trumpet
+that was upheld noiselessly by an unseen hand from a shrub. He touched
+it, and the trumpet swayed. The picture was solid.
+
+A tall, stiff figure came out of the rest-house and sat with me on the
+verandah. That elderly missionary’s white linen suit, neatly creased,
+and his collar and black bow, which would have been unremarked in
+Oxford Street, made me conscious of my own careless and limp attire.
+I always felt that that man might, as a reasonable and friendly
+neighbour--for we had the rest-house to ourselves--concede something
+in his dress. But he never relented. The Malay servants could be in no
+doubt as to which of us was the important Tuan. One of those silent
+familiars now shaped near us. He brought tea and two queer little
+cakes. I liked the look of those cakes, but the missionary whistled
+for the dog, and gave away the cakes perfunctorily. He rubbed his
+fingers with a handkerchief, and then turned his signet-ring into
+its right position. He inclined his head kindly to me in a little
+cross-examination. What had I seen to-day?
+
+He stirred his tea, and shook his head in depreciation over some native
+wares I had bought. Poor stuff, he said. No good. Better bring it to
+him in future, before buying it. But it was very hard now to get the
+genuine old material. He had been collecting it all over the islands
+for years. He enumerated what rare treasure he had been able to acquire
+from time to time. The European collectors were willing to pay highly
+for it. But it was getting very scarce.
+
+He carefully crossed his legs, for to keep neat an ironed linen suit
+for an hour or two in a moist heat demands the unremitting attention of
+a man whose self-control is automatic. Why, in the past, he continued,
+when he visited one of the islands of an isolated group, with some
+tact and wholesale baptism he could persuade a village to surrender
+all its totems, idols, carvings and copper drums. Not to-day, though.
+The whole region has been swept clean. Everybody is converted, or has
+no God, or is a Mohammedan. But you could buy plenty of English and
+American stuff. After a pause, which was like an interval for silent
+regret over good things lost in the past, he spoke, dispassionately,
+and with the forgiving voice of an ethnologist, who understood the
+deep springs of astonishing human conduct, of the immoralities of the
+islanders. He was no bigot. He did not tell me that, but I was sure he
+forgave irregularities in all but Europeans, and he understood even
+those.
+
+He had spent fifteen years among the islands. The natives had the
+minds of children. I learned from him how they should be treated by
+any benefactor. I was looking at his moustache, for it was interesting
+to see how little his lips moved as he spoke. There was firmness
+even in those short iron-grey bristles. His eyes, under those shaggy
+brows, looked on me from a rectitude which now he could trust without
+bothering about it. The tropics had made no difference to him. His skin
+was fresh, and looked hard. He offered me one of his excellent Dutch
+cigars. He became grimly amused over the instructions left by a white
+trader for him to carry out. He had buried that man the week before
+last. That fellow had begged the missionary--because he knew his Malay
+mistress with her four half-caste children would be careless about
+it--to have erected a sort of shrine over his grave, with pictures from
+the Scriptures to hang in it, and this text in a principal place: “I am
+the resurrection and the life.”
+
+A group of women, their bright gowns as noticeable in the quiet as a
+burst of gay music, idled slowly past the foot of the garden, and one
+of them turned her dark face shyly to look at the missionary, but very
+sternly he did not look at her. The tropics were outside his heart.
+He could not be invaded. His stiff figure could at any time assume
+its winter dress in Europe, and he could begin again as though sly
+but inviting glances across a tropical shrubbery, and sunny islands
+where life is different, were only like the phases of the moon, which
+may be observed, if the almanac is watched, and you are sufficiently
+interested.
+
+The crowns of the areca palms changed, as the sun went down, into three
+high fountains of gold, which quickly sank into the shades. There
+were burning films of rose in the sky. Then their light, too, went
+out. A firefly began to glint in zigzags before the verandah, and a
+cricket shrilled. A servant brought a lamp. “These islanders come to my
+church, when I am here, or they go to the mosque,” said the missionary
+gravely, “but they are all pagans at heart. A man and woman will live
+together for years, and then come and be married for luck, and bring
+their children with them. They are baptised for luck. They try to be
+on the right side all round. I know them. I haven’t given them fifteen
+years of my life for nothing.”
+
+“But you suggest that you have when you tell me they are still pagans.”
+
+The missionary did not answer. He recrossed his legs carefully. “I like
+them,” he said simply. “They are good-hearted.”
+
+“If ever you are on the main island come and see me,” he said late that
+night. “My home is there. You may like to look at my collection.”
+
+The next day he had gone to another congregation across the water.
+When presently a ship came for me, and I left that beach, she touched
+on her way home at the village the missionary had named, and there
+was time to visit his home. The afternoon was almost done. The sun
+was setting over Borneo, across the water, in a clear saffron sky. I
+waited for the evangelist on his verandah, and could see through his
+dwelling of timber to the bright light in the west. The interior of the
+house was in darkness, but that further doorway was a shape of gold,
+in which distant coconut palms formed a design in black. I felt I had
+discovered in that home its resident and privy dream. I spoke of this
+to the missionary. He did not look at it. “It is very beautiful,” he
+said gravely.
+
+He led me through that further door of gold to the garden that we might
+watch the sunset. “I have an arbour on the beach,” he said. A frail
+little woman was seated within that arbour. She wore an old-fashioned
+shape of crochet work on her grey hair. She smiled at me but did not
+speak. “My wife,” the missionary explained. I thanked her for lending
+me so beautiful an outlook on the world. There could be no nobler place
+anywhere from which to see the sun go down. She nodded, and smiled
+sadly, and said “Yes, isn’t it?”
+
+The missionary interrupted my attempt to come to an understanding with
+my hostess. He had a request that I should take his mail with me. “You
+can take the letters with you when you board your ship to-night.” We
+both walked back to the house, leaving his wife in the arbour. She was
+still looking over the sea to the western light.
+
+He turned to me and shook his head. He touched his forehead
+significantly.
+
+“She sits there all day,” he said. “She sits there, and when she sees a
+ship going home, she weeps.”
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE RAJAH
+
+
+We were told that if we followed the track through the forest for three
+more days we should reach the River Golok, by Nipong. Then, supposing
+we could find a prahu and men, another day’s journey would bring us
+down stream to Rantau Panjang. There we should see so unlikely an
+object as a railway station, on a branch of the Malay States Railways.
+With further luck we should catch one of the rare trains, and so reach
+Tumpat at our ease.
+
+There was no hurry. I did not wish to catch a train again before I was
+compelled. Just then there were no days of the week. We had morning and
+night, and sun or rain. At night, the rain drumming on the leaves was
+always on the same leaves, and it was the same rain. We were nowhere,
+and I suspected that the real calendar might dispute with my diary over
+three missing days. What had we done with them? But three days mislaid
+in that forest might look like three dead leaves. Wherever we camped
+the place looked like the spot where we halted the evening before.
+Nothing had changed. The cicadas struck up the same song at the moment
+when day became exalted, that moment before its light went out. Those
+still trees suggested our exemption from what concerned an outer world;
+we were held by the very spell which kept the jungle from progress.
+
+But one afternoon our canoe shot out of the solitude. While watching
+glide past us what I thought was the same forest, I saw a woman on
+the bank glance up in surprise from her water-pot as our shadow went
+by her. A little later there was an incredible modern bridge of iron
+across the river ahead of us. It was as surprising as coconut palms
+would be at Charing Cross. We landed, and found bottled beer could be
+had by asking for it. To the Chinese shopkeeper those English labels
+were as familiar as his own symbols. I thought, for a moment, that a
+London excursionist could be at home in that remote Malay village in
+five minutes.
+
+By the light of morning this surprising homeliness appeared the less
+secure. It was no more than a little cheerful bravado. The railway
+bridge, the big Sikh policemen with their rifles, and the array of
+bottles of European drinks on the shelves of the Chinaman’s store,
+were not triumphantly significant. The wilderness was not far away.
+It almost reached the bridge. It stood, patient and dark, waiting
+just across the padi marshes, with the blue untraversed hills of the
+interior above it. The sun was that of the dry monsoon. Sauntering
+leisurely across the iron railway bridge were figures which could have
+been assembling for the rehearsal of a strange drama, for the costumes
+of those women coming from Siam into Kelantan to market would make
+the ballet of a musical comedy look tawdry and unreal. They followed
+the railway track to the station buildings, where they sat by their
+wares, which mostly were fruits, scarlet and emerald chillies, yellow
+lansats, mangosteens the colour and size of new cricket-balls, and
+crimson rambutans. The natives were as quiet and passive as images.
+Only their eyes moved; and when a girl whose father was a Chinaman and
+her mother a Siamese villager looks at you, then you understand that
+the art of coquetry has been nothing but a Western phrase. The quiet
+folk of the country, whose life showed ardent only in the audacious
+colours of their dress, which betrayed their silence and langour; the
+strange houses under a weight of sun, and the palms and bamboos jetting
+from the ground like fountains, made that railway track, neat and
+direct as Western logic, as queer as such logic often appears in the
+East. The station clock bore the name of a famous London maker. But
+perhaps it gave only the London hour, and the palms knew better. This
+also was bravado. The track, so much like commercial orderliness and
+promptitude, was empty in both directions. Its ballast and sleepers
+were as arid, hot, and hopeless, as a trail in the desert. A buzzard
+was floating overhead. Two Chinamen were quarrelling outside the
+waiting-room.
+
+The unbelievable train came as a sudden shadow and an uproar.
+Confidence was restored. The order and progress of a Western notion
+cut straight into the East, and at almost the appointed minute. And
+presently the cluster of huts and the groups of people by the station
+began to recede. More progress was being made.
+
+I found myself beside an Englishman in an otherwise empty carriage.
+He was a stout young man in a despondent suit of Shantung silk. His
+white sun hat was beside him. He held a handkerchief in his hand, which
+frequently he passed across his moist face, blowing as he did it. He
+was reclining his heavy body on one elbow, but his eyes were alert and
+cheerful. “Morning,” he said loudly. “Didn’t expect to see anyone at
+that station.”
+
+He was communicative. He was not like the Malays, who will travel
+with you all day and use only a few words when necessary, reserving
+their quiet gossip for the evening. I soon knew that he was not like
+the East, which, however, he understood very well. He thought trade
+was reviving. He himself was not doing so badly. Only leave alone the
+people who knew what to do, and no nonsense, and believe him ... and so
+on. These natives liked being governed and ordered about. They’d never
+do anything unless they were made to. Lazy swine. Look at him! Fat! Yet
+he got through enough work, hot as it was.
+
+What was more, there was gold in that country. Only wanted developing.
+A little organisation, sir. The Malays didn’t know. The Siamese didn’t
+know. Nor care. The people who knew would have to see that it was done.
+He hoped to make enough in another five years to get home for good.
+Then, a little place in the country, and a seat on the local bench, and
+he would be happy.
+
+The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as motionless as figures
+in metal. My fellow passenger was telling me that he had been given a
+rotten O. B. E. for what he did during the war, but it ought to have
+been a K. B. E. He reckoned he had earned it. As he told me this I was
+looking at a Malay child, holding a big deer by a cord. They stared
+at us intently without moving, and might have been trying to catch
+a word or two about the O. B. E. as we went slowly past those huts.
+I heard more then about the rewards for industrious men who would
+attend strictly to their business in that land, and of what fellows he
+knew, knew quite well, had been given for their war services. “Though,
+dammit, sir, they had made enough without that.”
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _The buffaloes stared at us as we went along, as
+  motionless as figures in metal._
+]
+
+We ran into our last station. I looked from my carriage window on the
+strangest figure of a Malay I had seen. He was an old man, but as
+stout as my English fellow-traveller. He wore a yellow sarong, and
+yellow is the royal colour. But his tunic was the old scarlet affair,
+with yellow facings, of an English infantryman. Instead of the hat of
+a Mohammedan, he wore a white regimental helmet. He had a blue sash.
+On his breast were displayed a number of ornate decorations, brass
+regimental badges, and medals won by other people in the past for the
+most diverse things--for swimming at Plymouth and running at Stamford
+Bridge. And central on his breast, hanging by a cord, was a conspicuous
+red reflector from the rear lamp of a bicycle.
+
+My English friend knew him well. He greeted the Malay cheerfully, and
+bestowed on him another decoration, a silverplated monogram he had
+found. The old man was so delighted that he regarded my contribution
+of a dollar with no joy whatever. He continued his conversation with my
+friend, in Malay, while he crumpled my currency note in his hand.
+
+The Englishman turned to me, as we left the ancient, and chuckled. “See
+his battle honours and decorations, and all that? Quite mad, you know.
+Used to be a rajah till we turned him out, and thinks he’s one still.
+Just as well to humour the poor old thing.”
+
+
+
+
+V. THE STORM PETREL
+
+
+I paused on the bridge in Old Gravel Lane, that surprising lapse in the
+walls of Wapping, because water was on either side of it. The street
+lamps were just lit, but the sky was still high and yellow. The forms
+of the ships under the dock warehouses were plain, like dim creatures
+asleep in the shadows at the base of cliffs. It did not look like the
+present, that silent scene, but the past. I was peering into the past,
+a vista down the London Dock which evening was quickly closing, when
+Captain McLachlan took hold of me and brought me back to Old Gravel
+Lane. I didn’t know his ship was in port. “Don’t lie,” he jollied me.
+“Don’t pretend you knew I was in, and that you were looking for me.”
+
+As if anyone would lie to McLachlan! No need. He is too good-natured,
+too sagacious. So judicious and deliberate that he would see through
+almost any neat and nicely polished artifice. “You never told me you
+would be here to-day,” I reminded him.
+
+“Well, I’m off at midnight,” he said, still with a grip on my arm. “You
+come along with me.”
+
+“Not to Glasgow,” I said in alarm.
+
+“No. Just as far as she is now. There she is.” The skipper pointed to a
+misty confusion of funnels and masts up the dock.
+
+It seemed easy to get to her. She was not far off. But in fact, at
+that hour, which was neither day nor night, our little journey through
+streets and sheds, and by quaysides where lower lights were burning
+though day was in the sky, and the shapes of things were queer, was
+like an excursion into an inverted world. It was confused. What were
+streets doing there, and ships? They had been jumbled in an antipodean
+upset. The lights were not in the right places. The shadows were all
+wrong. Funnels were in the streets, apparently, and houses in the
+water. But the skipper kept on talking, stepping over mooring ropes and
+children on kerbstones.
+
+“That was a nasty passage down,” he was saying.
+
+“It was? But I don’t remember a blow this week.”
+
+“I do; but you wouldn’t have noticed it. I didn’t like it. Here’s me,
+with forty years of it, but I didn’t like it. Once or twice I wondered
+whether the old girl could stand it. Aye. Most of the way from the
+Broomielaw. Mind that rope.”
+
+We were standing now on concrete, looking up at a steamer’s counter.
+This was McLachlan’s charge. She was not a liner, but an aristocrat
+compared with the usual coaster. She looked quite big in that place and
+in that light.
+
+The skipper was shaking his head. “God forbid that I ever see the Storm
+Petrel again.”
+
+This was a little ridiculous, and not at all like my friend. Almost
+superstitious of him. I thought it was his fun, but then he turned to
+mount the gangway of his ship. His face, downcast to his footing, was
+serious enough. His short, hard moustache looked even grim. It was
+amusing to discover that the skipper, among the orderly and scientific
+sequence of his experiences and thoughts, should allow an old myth
+about a bird to interrupt Scotch logic so irrelevantly. I chuckled as
+I followed the elderly seaman to his ship, and to divert his attention
+asked his opinion about the derivation and uses of the word cleat. That
+gangway reminded me of it. There had been a dispute ashore about it,
+and McLachlan was the man who would know. He keeps even _The Golden
+Bough_ in his cabin, with Burns, Shelley, _The Evolution of the Idea
+of God_, an encyclopædia, and other incongruous companions. He is
+the unknown but harsh enemy of all hurried journalists. His untiring
+exactitude over trifles is awe-inspiring, and even tedious to casual
+and indifferent men. He paused on deck, gave me the root of the word,
+and assured me of all its uses, with qualifications; then turned into a
+door and descended to the saloon.
+
+His steward stood at attention as we squirmed into those seats which
+will not push back from saloon tables, and then the man went, as the
+captain made a perfunctory sign for what we wanted. The skipper sat
+without speaking till he had the glass in his hand. “Ye see, I knew we
+were in for it as soon as I clapped eyes on yon lunatic,” he remarked.
+He had not been at all cautious with what he measured into the glasses.
+“As soon as the Storm Petrel came aboard, two firemen went ashore. He
+was enough for them. No good talking to the fellows. They were scared.
+They knew what that warning meant, and it happened they saw him coming
+up the gangway.”
+
+“I thought it was a bird,” I said.
+
+“No. It’s a parson. You’d know him fine if you were coasting. A wee
+man. I can’t leave the ship myself, but I wished the fellow to the
+devil. He didn’t look like a man of God to me that night for all his
+clericals. And he was so damn jolly when he saw me. He always is.
+‘There’s something brewing, captain,’ says he, rubbing his hands.
+‘You’re going to get a dusting.’ He was in his oilskins then. A good
+beginning, wasn’t it?”
+
+“And you got it?”
+
+“And we did. Anyhow, the sight of that man made me give a good look to
+everything.” He paused for a spell, with his service cap pushed well
+back, so that I could see the unweathered top of his forehead. He began
+talking to the clock at the end of the saloon very deliberately. “I’ve
+seen too much to be easily scared. Perhaps I’m too old to be scared at
+all. No. I wouldn’t call it fear, at my age. It’s not that. Y’see, you
+can watch heavy weather without worry, when you know your ship. That’s
+just it--knowing her. It isn’t a matter of calculation. You know, but
+you don’t quite know why. So I wouldn’t say that I’m afraid of big
+waters--not often--not to call it that. But it’s happened at times that
+I’ve had a sort of white feeling inside me while gripping a stanchion.
+You could tell it then. The little ship herself was frightened. She’d
+got more than she could do.
+
+“So it was that night, and all the next day. I had the feeling twice.
+But that blackbird was enjoying it. He always does, though I hoped then
+he’d got more than he’d bargained for. But not him. He was all right.
+I wished he’d gone overside.”
+
+“Who is he? What’s his caper?” I asked.
+
+“He’s a parson. Got a quiet vicarage somewhere, I suppose. I’ve thought
+about him a lot. Church too peaceful for him, maybe. He mustn’t sin,
+not in a small country parish, and he needs excitement. It’s as good as
+drink to him. Better, perhaps. Anyhow, he looks for trouble. He comes
+and has it with us. ‘Sir,’ says the steward, ‘Mr. Jenkins has just
+come aboard.’ ‘The hell he has,’ I say, and look at the glass. Sure
+enough, down it goes. And there the wee man is. ‘Hullo, captain,’ he
+says, ‘good evening. But it won’t be good for long. I’ve been watching
+the barometer, and I’ve just had this telegram from the Meteorological
+Office. There’s going to be a snorter.’ He always seems as pleased
+as though he’d come into a legacy. Rubs his hands. Looks round. ‘I’m
+coming along with you,’ says the blackbird.
+
+“And a snorter it is, for sure. All the coasters know him. You ought to
+hear the men when they see him hurrying along the quay, just before we
+cast off. They’d tip him overside, give him all the trouble there is,
+if he wasn’t always so grateful afterwards for the good time he’s had
+with us. He’s free with his tips. He pays for his fun.”
+
+“Well, anyway, that’s over,” said the skipper. He poured out some more.
+“I deserve this,” he went on. “That last was a voyage and a half. Now
+look here. There’s four hours to midnight. I haven’t seen you to talk
+to you yet. You run home and get your bag. Come round with us. You know
+you can. So don’t argue. I want to hear about things. It’ll be a quiet
+trip this time.”
+
+“Any other passengers?”
+
+“Not one. It’s not the season. We’ll have it to ourselves. Likely we’ll
+have spring weather all the way. That last blow must have emptied the
+sky. What’s this I hear about the American astronomer who is denying
+Einstein? Come and tell me.”
+
+I rose to go. It was tempting. I had got to like the smell of the ship.
+She looked good. And McLachlan’s reliable face, with its taut mouth and
+moustache, and mocking and contemplative eyes--a talk with him would be
+more than a holiday. Could I do it?
+
+We mounted the companion to the deck. It was a still night, with an
+audience of placid little clouds about a full moon. The dock was
+asleep. I went with the captain to his cabin, for he had a book of
+mine, and he wished to return it. That peaceful cabin, with its
+library, and the broad back of the sailor as he peered into his
+bookcase, settled it. I would hurry home and get my bag. Then there
+was a voice behind me: “Sir, Mr. Jenkins has come back. He’s just come
+aboard.”
+
+The skipper turned slowly round to stare at his steward, dragging his
+spectacles from his eyes as he did so. His mouth was partly open. He
+only stared for some seconds.
+
+“Has that man brought his bag, Jones?”
+
+“Yes, sir. He’s in his oilskins, sir.”
+
+
+
+
+VI. ON THE CHESIL BANK
+
+
+I
+
+The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing,
+but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed
+wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge
+and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship
+in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the
+bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.
+
+A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle
+that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It
+moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned
+with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me
+as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It
+was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office,
+three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in
+a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in
+some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of
+earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I
+wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the
+envelope. “Conrad is dead.”
+
+I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be
+something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger
+spoke. “Anything to go back?”
+
+Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems
+justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men
+who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and
+spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not
+seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a
+distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by
+lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds
+in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty
+that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in
+years that have not been easily borne.
+
+Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption
+in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned.
+It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to
+be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes
+his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and
+overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous,
+a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us
+are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can
+never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us
+that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps,
+was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent
+stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself,
+something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He
+would utter such a word as _Meddlers_, meaning you and me, meaning all
+those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint
+of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim
+_Humanitarians_ in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men
+are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English
+affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself,
+doubting his right to--well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept
+out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was
+silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English,
+giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when
+we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic
+gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he
+was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike,
+and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw
+them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.
+
+I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read
+Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics.
+The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some
+experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told,
+have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen
+as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among
+them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty
+yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However,
+one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the _Nigger_, and began
+it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The
+_Narcissus_ was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the
+South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the
+virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which
+I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I
+had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This
+novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for
+his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.
+
+There could be no doubt about it. The _Nigger_ was the thing itself,
+and I had never expected to see it. Next I read _Typhoon_; and the
+_Nan-Shan_ and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day
+somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to
+look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it
+was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to
+the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships
+and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages
+of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for
+_Youth_ it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the
+language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in
+such a ship.
+
+Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they
+knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they
+knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say
+Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed
+then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had
+given the public his best work years before he received from us
+any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and
+modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that
+his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind
+that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first
+in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office
+of the _English Review_ in its earlier days. Because I knew he was
+a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little
+haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his
+books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas
+and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad
+then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as
+nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about
+my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”
+
+I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at
+Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me
+one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however
+neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It
+would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many
+of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be
+forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly
+a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other
+day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and
+expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had _Youth_ to his
+credit, and _Typhoon_ and _Lord Jim_, touched the arm of his junior and
+was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”
+
+A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it
+sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest,
+Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption
+was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous
+absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness
+and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the
+naming of an arrogant crudity.
+
+I must say there is one of the company of the _Narcissus_ that I
+deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is
+not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin
+does a little to spoil the voyage of the _Narcissus_, for Conrad
+imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks,
+distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear
+that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that
+veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.
+
+Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous
+_Tales of Hearsay_, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the
+tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret
+patriotism worthily--or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the
+vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august
+simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and
+men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted
+with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully
+shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the
+patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood
+in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be
+entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we
+know who have true religion. We have it.
+
+No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame
+Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles
+as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic
+characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire;
+then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long
+intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to
+Allah. There is that to go back.
+
+
+II
+
+When I return to a London suburb I think I shall try to cultivate
+something resembling one of the drains which occur here and there on
+the lower slopes of the Wessex moorland above the Chesil Bank. These
+ditches make our best horticultural efforts as vulgar as excessive
+begonias. The effect achieved by a ditch comes, apparently, without
+intent and labour. When a drain is constant over shelves of limestone
+from an upper spring, and then gathers into a shallow basin before
+losing itself in the porous desert near the sea; when it occurs so in
+a narrow combe with a southerly descent and is sheltered from the hard
+drive of westerly weather, then the still lower air is tropical, and
+English weeds flourish with an extravagance which hints at a fearful
+vitality suppressed by cultivation.
+
+One such tiny combe is a short walk above the tamarisks and the white
+wall of my house. It is easy and even pleasant to carry thither those
+books some wilful editors consider that I ought to read, unluckily for
+the books and for them; because if I get well above the ditch then the
+smell of thyme makes the synthetic odours of a modern novel, as from a
+dressing table, seem a little queer. No getting round that criticism.
+And if I stay by the ditch then I waste all the morning standing about
+in that luxuriant tangle, as fascinated by it as the hover-flies appear
+to be. No good then to try to read any book. Foolish to expect the wit
+of recent prose to prove like a dragon-fly, or a lyric to soar and
+poise like a red admiral. On a hot day, too, the smell of the water
+mint would make the strongest inducement of Mille Fleurs seem very
+silly. Besides, one has first to get to the ditch. It is quite near,
+but the time one takes to reach it is ridiculous. The ditch lies on the
+other side of an old wall, which is built--or created, for the wall
+bears no evidence of design--of loose slabs of a limestone of the Lias.
+
+That wall is the trouble. It is hard to get over it, and impossible
+to get round it. Most of it is hidden in a torrent of bramble, which
+pours headlong downhill. That wild of bramble is itself a domain in its
+own right. I have discovered that it is an inhabited tunnel, and the
+waves of hooked branches form its roof. One morning a stoat, which
+was leaping about in a game that needs but one player, saw me coming,
+and dived into a lower door of the mass. Out of other doors, till then
+unknown, rabbits shot at once, as by magic. It was as though this earth
+could erupt all the life it needs, at any moment. I suspect these hills
+could do very well without us, and if Downing Street were to become
+permanently untenanted perhaps our island would not look any the worse,
+from one point of view.
+
+A good length of the wall is exposed, at one place. That part of it
+is, as an orderly mind would say, in need of repair. I hope it will
+never get it. It is a delightful ruin. Slabs of limestone are scattered
+about the foot of a ruin of loose rock. They vary in colour. They may
+be a pale buff, or a bluish grey. The surface of a slab is frequently
+water-worn, and then it is smooth and silky to the touch, and is
+lustrous. It looks warm and rich, as though the bones of earth had an
+unctuous marrow. And any chance fragment makes the age of the tumuli
+on the hill-top as recent as yesterday, for it will be loaded with
+fossils, the relics of a sea in which the dinosaurs lived. The chance
+cross-sections of many nacreous shells give such a tablet of rock the
+appearance of being marked with shining hieroglyphics; what reading
+matter for us! No wonder it takes some time to get over it, this wall!
+Lizards whisk into its crevices, the flickering of shadows where all is
+still.
+
+Below the overturned wall is the combe in which runs the ditch. There
+is a dark screen of stunted Scotch firs on the edge of its far side to
+keep any of the Channel gusts from spilling over. The weeds below have
+no need to adjust themselves to the draughts. They grow as they please.
+Teazle and hemp-agrimony flourish into small trees. Once you begin to
+climb uphill through that jungle, out of the lower fringe of mint and
+flea-bane--it is time a better name was found for that pleasant little
+yellow herb of the waste and damp lands--you feel that the heat of
+the sun is really a direct and incessant burning. The air is humid,
+and strongly aromatic. The growth in that hollow might be the work
+of a spell. It does not move. It seems theatrical and even a little
+threatening in its absolute quietude and stillness. Some resolution
+is needed for an advance into it. The pinkish murk of the crowns of
+hemp-agrimony rises above the cream plumes of the meadow-sweet, and
+though one knows of no attraction in its flower-heads, the butterflies
+do. I suppose it gives them an upper platform in the light. Out in
+the wind you may not see a butterfly all day, but here it is usual on
+a sunny morning to find a gathering of scores of tortoise-shells,
+peacocks, and red admirals. Perhaps it is a tradition with them that
+this is the best retreat on the coast. It is a good tradition and
+should be preserved. I am not sure which of those insects is the most
+handsome, but I think whichever one of them happens to be arranging
+itself on the nearest crown, heliotropically, really presenting to the
+sun its coloured design, yet behaving--if I remain as still as the
+garden itself--as though it were doing its best to get into the right
+light for my benefit. Well, it is for my benefit, as well as for my
+humiliation, because I realise that such a design, though worked to
+no useful purpose that I can guess, being in that respect inferior
+to my own designs, yet still might be considered superior to the art
+of my own well-directed efforts. In any case, while that assembly of
+useless living colours is winged and convulsive above the weeds, on a
+good morning, it seems a sort of idleness to make the usual notes of a
+critic of books.
+
+
+III
+
+There is no harbour on the curved sweep of this bank of shingle for
+many miles in either direction. The line of the beach in the north
+curves so imperceptibly that to the eye it looks straight; towards
+the southern end it sweeps round like the blade of a sickle, and is as
+sharp in the run. The five-fathom mark is close inshore, so the first
+line of breakers is direct upon the shingle. The usual weather, of
+course, is westerly; nearly always south of west. And in that direction
+I suppose the next land would be the Bahamas, but I have only local
+maps, and can lay no exact course to what landfall is in the eye of
+the wind. Anyhow, there is so much ocean between us and the next land
+that the waves come in, with any seaward breeze, in regular and massed
+attacks. They growl as they charge. In summer weather like this it is
+a cheerful noise, for they are only playing roughly. Then they break
+and make the shingle fly, with a roar; and a myriad little stones, as a
+wave draws back, follow it with thin cries.
+
+Both the sea and the coast look bare and barren. Terns in couples
+patrol up and down, and so close to me that I can see their black
+caps. Occasionally one will dive--two seconds under water--and it
+comes up with something which glitters for an instant. On the ridge
+of the shingle bank a little vegetation is recumbent, forming close
+mats and cushions, with sere stalks that quiver in the wind, as though
+apprehensive of their footing. The sea looks even more infertile than
+the desert of stones. You feel that you and your book, and the terns
+which now and then find something which glitters, are all the intruding
+life there is. But some distance away there are a few boats drawn up
+high and dry--they make good shelters to leeward of sun and wind,
+and they have a strong but pleasing smell--and at odd times, usually
+towards evening, a crew of six men will come along to get one out. She
+is launched down the slope on wooden rollers, in short runs. Half the
+crew go in her, and one of them throws a seine net steadily overside.
+The other fellows have the shore end of the seine. The boat goes round
+a considerable bight, and then lands the other end of the net. If you
+imagine that hauling in that net and its floats, when any tide is
+running, is nothing but fun, the men will not object if you put on your
+weight. That way there is much to be learned.
+
+The gradient of the shingle is steep, and when climbing it with a line
+in tow the feet slip back into the polished stones at every step. What
+has this to do, you ask, with a reader of books? Well, what do you
+suppose a bookman learns at a study table about life? Make him sail a
+boat now and then, or haul on a net, or herd cows, or dig clay, or weed
+a field instead of new novels; make him work, if not for a living,
+then just for a change. What does he imagine keeps London’s chimneys
+smoking? Once I heard a rude fellow interrupt a famous political
+economist, who was deploring the sad ways of coal miners. “If you,” he
+said, “could keep warm in winter only by hewing your own coal out of
+the rock, you know very well you’d sooner buy a pair of dumb-bells.”
+
+The feet crunch and slip, steadily, while the floats of the net seem to
+bob no nearer the shore. The weight comes with a rush just about when
+you feel it is better to read books than to handle seine nets. There is
+a heaving and a slapping on the stones. To most of us, of course, fish
+is fish. There is only fish. Yet one haul of the net is almost sure
+to bring in forms that are fishes, certainly, but which demand to be
+named. They are so challenging that they stick in the memory, and must
+be exorcised with names, as we resolve, by putting names to them, all
+the mysteries that trouble us.
+
+I love fish markets. I enjoy even Billingsgate, though one does get
+pushed about there, early mornings, and its rain of slobber is bad
+for neat raiment. One of the most beautiful and terrifying scenes
+on this earth is a fish market of the tropics. When next you are in
+Tanjong Priok, do not forget, as you did last time, to go to its fish
+market. But this English shingle beach, barren as its stones look,
+is a good substitute for the Tanjong, when the seine net is fruitful.
+For occasionally it is fruitful, though a deal of wet and heavy labour
+may be wasted on six mackerel and some squids. The fishermen have no
+use for the squids, nor have I, but they may be enjoyed. You need
+only look at them, for they are like odd Chinese shapes in polished
+and transparent quartz, but magically illuminated from within by the
+principle of life. Life flushes each hyaline figure. And though, to
+one way of thinking, six mackerel are not so good as six thousand, yet
+from another they are just as good. A wonderful family, that of the
+mackerel! You no sooner begin to remember tunny, albacore, and bonito,
+than you are translated to a distant sea. There is something else, too.
+We never see mackerel--or, for that matter, any other fish, in London.
+We see only provender there. On the stones of this beach, when the red
+globe of the sun sits almost a-top of the western headland, and the air
+grows bleak, a mackerel fresh from the sea might be a big fire-opal
+lost to the ocean’s enchantment. Yes, you may feel a shudder of fear
+when overlooking the heaving pocket of the seine net.
+
+And how little one knows of such a gathering from the gardens of the
+pulse! A red gurnard, with its staring eyes of violet, and the livid
+violet margin to its pectorals, never suggests anything for the pot.
+Those steady eyes look at you with disconcerting interest. There are
+red mullet and grey, gar-fish like green snakes, horse mackerel,
+herring, plaice and dabs, and fry that might be leaping shavings of
+bright metal. The other afternoon a salmon came in with the rest, a
+very king, a resplendent silver torpedo of a fellow, who scattered the
+shingle before he was overcome. And now, because I have been warned
+that I may look for even stranger messengers from the world we do not
+know, I am waiting for the opah, the _chimæra mirabilis_, the angel
+fish, Darkie Charlie, and the oar-fish or sea-serpent.
+
+
+IV
+
+That overcrowding of which we complain--declaring first that our
+cities are much too great, and then blaming our officials because the
+buildings do not spread quickly enough--is something we really enjoy,
+I suppose. We could not live without the support of the multitude. We
+love to walk down Fleet Street, jostling each other on the inadequate
+sidewalks, pressed together between the motor-buses and the shop
+fronts. We find the crowd, and keep with it on instinct. The fruits
+of solitude are astringent and we do not like them. Nothing else will
+explain why we would sooner sit uncomfortably with fifty strangers in
+a charabanc, for a journey through a land we cannot see, to a place
+which is exactly like the one from which we started, than stroll across
+country in peace at our own gait.
+
+Yesterday I had to go to town again. It ought to have been a pleasure
+trip, because the town nearest to me is described on the posters, with
+coloured illustrations, as the kind of place for which men forsake
+even their London employment. When I remembered its many advertised
+attractions I felt almost glad that I was out of tobacco. At last I
+should see this notable pleasure resort with its golden sands and its
+joyous throng. The change would be interesting, because nothing had
+happened in my neighbourhood for some time, except weather. True, the
+tamarisk pennants had begun to rust, and in the next field there was
+stubble instead of oats. But, except the admonitions of a few selected
+books, the only sounds at an isolated cottage had been the occasional
+mewing of the gulls and the mourning of the sea. I had an idea, too,
+that the wind, as it came ashore, was glad to find our key-hole, for
+it desired a local habitation and a voice. The voice of the wind, I
+noticed, was in keeping with the monody of the sea. It is rare for any
+stranger to pass this house, though some porpoises went by the other
+afternoon. Just beyond a most individual sea-stock, which somehow is
+rooted and exalted on the wall at the foot of the garden, daring the
+light of the ocean, I saw the black forms of the little whales arch
+past, close in. And the other day a float, from one of the submarine
+nets of the days that were, drifted ashore, to have a chat with me
+about old times. It was the only distinguished stranger on the beach.
+
+The pleasure resort, therefore, I expect to bring me back to a
+conscious existence. Not far from its station there is a magnificent
+hotel, with a glass verandah and palms, under which I saw men in
+golfing dress sitting in wicker chairs brooding appreciatively across
+a broad asphalted road to the gathering ground of the charabancs; and,
+just beyond the motor vehicles, multitudes of red and yellow and blue
+air-balloons were swaying aloft, though their attachment to earth was
+out of sight. I threaded the charabancs, pushed aside men in white
+ulsters who shouted at me that it was only two bob, and brought up
+against some iron railings. I leaned on the iron railings for support;
+they were providential. The beach was below; I mean that I suppose it
+was, for it all was out of sight except a pailful of it immediately
+under my eyes, which a child was treasuring. A man was beside the
+child, in a canvas chair. How he got there it was impossible to see,
+but he looked worried about it, though resigned. Rank on rank of deck
+chairs stood between him and the sea, all occupied by people reading
+newspapers, or asleep, or dead; the intermediate spaces were filled
+with children. The very sea was invaded. It was impossible to discern
+where it reached the land. The crowds went out to meet it. They slurred
+its margin. And on either side of that holiday-maker below me, for
+miles apparently, the deck chairs extended and shut him in; the sea
+wall rose behind him. Would he starve to death? Nobody seemed to care.
+Nobody lowered a rope. When I left him he had fallen asleep, luckily;
+perhaps to dream of freedom.
+
+Whoever that man was, he was a voluntary prisoner. He must have sought
+it. If that had been the only beach on that coast, the only view of
+the sea to be got in the neighbourhood, it would be fair to guess that
+he had gambled with his hour, and had drawn a blank. Such an accident
+might happen to anybody, even in the desperate matter of catching the
+only train of the day, which one had hoped was late. Yet that will not
+explain his wretched position, because, whether he knew it or not,
+there is a beach not a great distance from where he was a prisoner on
+which could be lost the population of a city; but, as I happened to
+know, no life was there that morning except a few fishermen and some
+parties of sea-birds. Moreover, the views from that untenanted strand
+are incomparably finer and wider. It is possible to see from there
+what a desirable island we have, an island very far from being as
+overcrowded as we imagine.
+
+Indeed, if the country about that imprisoned holiday-maker has a
+fault, it is that it is largely as it was when the folk who built its
+hut-circles and cromlechs occupied it; though I myself do not find that
+fault with it. For most of a long day on its uplands a traveller will
+see more tumuli about him than warm and smoking homesteads. Within a
+morning’s walk of that crowded holiday beach, a fox dropped his rabbit,
+which he was carrying home, as I came round a prehistoric earthwork,
+and trotted off reluctantly, in broad daylight. He must have been
+greatly surprised to find a stranger was trespassing on his hill. On
+another morning we startled a weasel, which at that moment had worse
+than startled a short-tailed field mouse. He was more reluctant to go
+than the fox, but he did retire into a tangle. Not for long, though.
+His tiny snake-like head was out in a few moments, inspecting us. Then
+he stole out to look for his abandoned dinner. He became very peevish
+when he could not find it, for we had hidden it, and explored all the
+ruts and tussocks in the neighbourhood in impulsive leaps and gallops.
+We had a leisured view of his cream and chestnut figure, darting and
+writhing about a roadway which has long been obsolete. Once or twice he
+seemed as though he were on the point of attacking us.
+
+The land about that holiday resort has been loved by many great
+artists. The men who first tried to convert the English barbarians to
+Christianity saw its fruitfulness and settled there; but you might
+suppose, in spite of its colour, the nobility of its form, and the
+wealth of its tradition, that there was something wrong with it, for
+if you keep away from the tarred roads which connect the towns, and
+that is easy enough, you are in the England that was before the coming
+of the machines. Its contrast with that near holiday beach where the
+golden strand is invisible through pleasure-seekers suggests that the
+machines have so disordered our minds that we shall never again feel
+happy in independent contact with the earth.
+
+
+V
+
+The breakers are towering to-day. They explode above the tops of
+the tamarisks, which are tormented by a south-wester. If a door is
+opened, pandemonium enters the house. So I have been reading the
+poets when their subject is the sea. Byron when in a kindly mood once
+counselled the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.”
+Man, especially man the poet, with his conscious understanding of the
+universe, is inclined to haughtiness. He is a conqueror. He feels
+that he is one with the powers that roll and are blue. When he is not
+haughty and sombre in the presence of these powers, he includes them
+with those embracing thoughts which fondly gather in little children,
+fawns, and daisies. I do not speak with certain knowledge, but I should
+guess that any anthology of what poets have written about the sea must
+cause a mariner a little astonishment. Are they the waters he knows?
+Then he must be a rude and careless fellow. Now and then when turning
+the leaves of the book it may occur to him that perhaps the poet did
+not know what he was talking about. He may set out with “a wet sheet
+and a flowing sea and a wind that follows fast,” and bound along at
+the rate of knots for some stanzas; but presently he is sure to ask
+himself why with the wind in that quarter the good ship “leaves old
+England on the lee.”
+
+Yet that is a minor difficulty. We can see that a slip of that sort
+might happen even to a sailor who attempted poetry, especially when
+one remembers the exigencies of metre and rhyming. No; what would
+give the mariner most surprise would be the love the poets feel for
+the sea, their delight in it, their robust faith in its blueness and
+its rolling and in its beneficent and healing qualities. It might be
+a public garden, maintained by a highly capable Gardener. I have a
+number of those special anthologies, and a re-reading of them helps
+me to understand why it is that the people who, as they say, love the
+sea, prefer to show their love only at certain favoured points of our
+coasts, and to leave most of the shore line to the wind and the gulls.
+These anthologies are not together for their assuagement; for the most
+part, the poems concern an ocean which can be enjoyably contemplated
+on a warm day, in choice company, with light thoughts hovering about,
+vague but gleaming, like the birds. We must have the moral support of
+society when loving the sea. What would happen if we were left alone
+with it? One lonely evening by its margin might be enough to scare most
+of us towards the comfort of the nearest railway station’s lamps.
+There is but little suggestion of this, however, in the anthologies.
+They brave it out. “_High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_,” or “_The
+Sands of Dee_”--such unexpected chill shadows may at times intervene,
+and change the look of the sea. The brightness goes. Yet only as the
+sun goes when a trifling cloud blows across its light and warmth. The
+waves soon sparkle once more according to their poetic wont, and the
+deep and dark blue ocean rolls on, the ships are brave and free, and
+jovial sailors look out on their world like happy imbeciles whose
+function it is to provide matter for our superior amusement. At the
+worst they saunter through Ratcliffe, as did the crew of the steamer
+_Bolivar_, “drunk and raising Cain,” but maintaining even then, we see,
+their reputation for imbecility. If they survive a dangerous voyage
+in a steamer, which was only a pack of “rotten plates puttied up with
+tar,” and meant to founder, their sailor-like protest shows merely in a
+riotous booze. “Euchred God Almighty’s storm, bluffed the eternal sea!”
+So let us adjourn to a tavern.
+
+We appear to be incorrigibly romantic. We prefer to give the reality
+any name but the one which shows we have surmised its nature. It is
+impolite in Malay society, and even unlucky at night, to mention
+the dreaded tiger by name. You must refer to him in an allusive and
+friendly way. With a maritime people the sea is lovely, and sailors
+are “salts” who provide some comic relief. The more absurd we find
+those fellows, then the more certain it is that they are genuine
+“old shellbacks.” How curious it is, then, that sea-lovers are so
+careful about encountering the object of their affections that they
+abstain from it except with the support of a multitude! What we mean
+is, I suppose, that we enjoy leisure when in the midst of our fellow
+creatures, in a place where everything is done to prevent our coming
+under those shadows cast by matters which puzzle or distress us, and
+therefore should be ignored or misnamed.
+
+The sea is such a shadow, whatever the light upon it. The soul of the
+sea, if it has one, is like that fabulous “soul of the war,” something
+from which no joy can come by brooding upon it. The sea fascinates me,
+I admit. I should not enjoy an English holiday away from the coast, and
+I should be glad if some wise person could explain exactly why. I have
+felt the same attraction, though then it was more acute, in the aspect
+of a desolate village which was under the ruthless eye of the enemy’s
+guns. I did not want to go there, but I went. At sunset alone on a
+beach where there is nothing but sea and sky and the forsaken shore,
+the look of the running waters, their harsh and melancholy voices, and
+the bleak wind which shivers the very herbage, make you feel that you
+are a homeless stranger. Is this your place? It does not look like
+it. If verses from the poets then come to your mind, it is only in an
+ironic way. Absurd to apostrophise that scene! Much effect upon it
+loving it would have. Perhaps the mere effort encourages the fearful
+and doubting heart of man, and for that reason we may welcome the poets
+and the romanticists, who give us the sensation of conquerors, which is
+something towards the conquest of mind over matter.
+
+The romance of the sea, the sea that inspired exultant lyric and
+stately prose, the sea wonderful with the old clippers to which we have
+looked back wistfully, is not quite the sea, we are beginning to feel,
+that we used to picture. Does that sea exist? It may be ungracious to
+question it at this moment, so soon after our recent rapture, sincerely
+felt, over the _Cutty Sark_. Yet there it is. We are living in an age
+of revolt. We are interrogating much that once was never questioned.
+Things must prove themselves anew. What we used to value may be lumber,
+and must go if it is, even when it is lumber of the mind.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever_--
+]
+
+As to the sea, it has no human attributes whatever, though it will
+absorb anything the poet will give it. It is as alien as the stars,
+which are bright over lovers, but were just as friendly to Scott’s
+little party when the blizzard stopped. We may feel what we like when
+we witness, from a ship off Sumatra, a tropical sunset. The spectacle
+of the billows of the uplifted Western ocean, in a winter twilight, is
+enough to make a man feel that he ought to have a religion; but that
+is only a confession of man’s wondering and questioning mind. There is
+more pertaining to man in a kitchen midden than in the spacious ocean
+when it most attracts us. Man, fronting the sea, the sea which is,
+inexplicably, both hostile and friendly to him because it knows nothing
+of his existence and his noble aims, is saddened, and is driven to meet
+its impersonal indifference with fine phrases, that his sense of his
+worth and his dignity may be rehabilitated. He knows it is absurd to
+pretend to any love for the sea.
+
+Then why does the sea attract us? For it does, even though we feel now
+that our lyrical exultation over its moods has been oddly irrelevant.
+It attracted in the same way the good seamen who were so ill-rewarded
+for their skill and endurance when making for us what is now the
+wistful memory of the clippers. They were ill-used, those men. We may
+make their times romantic in retrospective brooding, and with a sombre
+imagining of the soul of man fronting the hostile elements in stoic
+endurance. But it will not do. So much of their heroic endurance was
+necessitated by facts which any sensible dog would have avoided once
+he knew what they were like. To live in such quarters, on such food,
+while doing such work, when there was no need for it, when so easily it
+could have been ordered otherwise, may afford matter for an Iliad, if
+we choose to ignore the critical intelligence, but we cannot get credit
+for common sense on the score of it. And that kind of sense should be
+the beginning of the literature of the sea, as of all literature.
+
+Let us examine more cautiously, for example, that favourite book of the
+sea of ours, _The Nigger_. Remember that the barque _Narcissus_ was
+property, just as is a farm, and might never have been on her beam ends
+but for an eagerness for more money. Now consider the attitude of her
+master and his officers to their charge, as Conrad posed them for our
+approval; regard the fortitude and skill of the men in circumstances
+which Conrad pictures so vividly that we shrink as from a physical
+contact; and then observe Donkin, that Cockney guy set up for the
+contempt of all stout and virtuous lovers of duty; and own up! Is it
+just? Do we know Donkin the Cockney as at once we know Singleton, the
+old man of the sea? We know we do not. Such treatment ashore drove
+agricultural labourers to the penal settlements of Australia. These
+facts, so important in any examination of the problem of conduct--and
+that, we know, is what the _Nigger_ is,--are obscured by our admiration
+for Conrad’s noble tribute to Singleton, and for his pictures of a ship
+fighting the Southern Ocean.
+
+No doubt it would suit some ship-owners if the sea could be accepted as
+a cheap and providential means of testing the fundamental quality of
+the souls of men; and obviously some men would stand the test well. But
+beyond noting that this would ease the labours of the Recording Angel,
+I can see nothing in its favour. There is a need in literature, as in
+politics, to clear the mind of cant. Men intrinsically may be of less
+importance than good ships and the august spectacle of the sea; but
+they ought not to be so to us.
+
+But one could go on for a long time on such a subject as the sea in
+English literature, if one named merely the books and poems which to
+us seem to be right. There is, however, no need. One great sea story
+comprehends them all, as all who know _Moby Dick_ know well enough. It
+is the greatest book in the language on ships and the sea, because it
+is more than that. For the White Whale, that mythical monster, is as
+elusive as the motive of a symphony of Beethoven’s. Did the whale ever
+exist? There is the music to prove it. The harpooners followed it, a
+shadow among the very stars. That is something like a whaling voyage,
+when the boats leave the seas to hurl a lance at the Great Bear. Other
+voyages must end. But the quest of Captain Ahab’s ship is without end;
+and what would we expect of a craft whose master soliloquises like
+Macbeth? Outside the epistles of St. Paul, is there a sermon in any
+book which is like Father Mapple’s to the folk in his chapel at New
+Bedford? The cross-bearings taken by Captain Ahab to find his ship’s
+position, to set, if he can, the right course for her, would bring his
+ship to a harbour no man has ever reached. And he did not reach it.
+Destiny sank him and his companions in the waste. Yet we know the high
+adventure of his phantom whaler continues in the hearts of men. That is
+where the _Pequod_ sank.
+
+Many years ago I was discussing the literature of the sea with a Fleet
+Street colleague, a clever and versatile man against whose volatile
+enthusiasms experience had taught me to guard myself well. He began to
+talk of _Moby Dick_. Talk! He soon became incoherent. He swept aside
+all other books of the sea with a free, contemptuous gesture. There
+was only one book of the sea, and there never would be another. I fear
+that a native caution has shut me from many good things in life, so
+I smiled at my friend; yet, in the way of a cautious man, I smiled
+at him with sound reason. I had not read the White Whale; I had only
+heard rumours of it. But I had read _Typee_ and _Omoo_, and I knew
+them even better than my colleague; about whom I may point out that a
+brief experience on the Somme battlefield unbalanced his mind at last,
+and he died insane. Now _Typee_ and its mate are brisk and attractive
+narratives of travel and adventure, exuberantly descriptive, lively
+with their honey-coloured girls and palm groves, jolly with the talk of
+seamen in forecastles of ships sailing waters few of us know, though we
+all wish we did, and full of the observation of an original mind in a
+tropic world that is no more. But they are not great literature. I knew
+perfectly well that the author of _Typee_ was not the man to rise to
+that stellar altitude which moved my colleague to rapture and wonder.
+That was not Melville’s plane, and having read the American writer’s
+first two books, I thought a busy man, amid a wilderness of unread
+works, need not bother himself about this White Whale, for hardly a
+doubt it was just a whale.
+
+I was wrong. My friend who was unbalanced by the war was right. I find
+it difficult now to speak of Melville’s book within measure, for I
+have no doubt _Moby Dick_ goes into that small company of extravagant
+and generative works which have made other writers fertile, the books
+we cannot classify, but which must be read by every man who writes,
+_Gargantua and Pantagruel_, _Don Quixote_, _Gulliver’s Travels_,
+_Tristram Shandy_, and the _Pickwick Papers_. That is where _Moby Dick_
+is, and it is therefore as important a creative effort as America
+has made in her history. I would sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” if
+that is the proper hymn, with fervour, with the deepest sense of debt
+and gratitude, at any patriotic service of thanksgiving over _Moby
+Dick_. That book is one of the best things America has done since the
+Declaration of Independence. It justifies her revolution. I would
+assist another body of Pilgrim Fathers to any place on earth if on
+their venture depended the vitality of the seed of such a book as that.
+The indeterminate jungle of humanity flowers and is justified in its
+bibles, which carry in microcosm the fortunate future of mankind, or
+if there be no fortune for it in its future, then in its tragic but
+godlike story.
+
+If a reader of books desires to know the truth about his understanding
+of English prose, whether it is natural and proper, or whether
+his interest in it has been but suggested by the critics and the
+conventions of the more popular reading of his time, like the habit
+of going to Church or voting at elections, there is a positive test.
+Let him read the book by Herman Melville about a whale. If he does not
+like it he should not read it. As soon as imagination begins to sport
+with our language, then our words, that were familiar, become strange;
+their import seems different; you cannot see quite through them. They
+suggest that they are mocking us. They seem a trifle mad. They break
+free from our rules and behave indecorously. They are transmuted from
+the solid currency into invalid hints and shadows with shifting lights
+and implications. They startle with suggestions of deeps around us the
+existence of which we had not suspected. They hover too perilously
+near the horizon of sanity and proved things, beyond which we venture
+at our peril. They become alive and opalescent, and can be terrifying
+with the foreshadowing of powers beyond the range of what has been
+explored and is understood. As in all great art, something is suggested
+in Melville’s book that is above and greater than the matter of the
+story. Upon the figures in Melville’s drama and their circumstances
+there fall lights and glooms from what is ulterior, tremendous, and
+undivulged. Through the design made by the voyage of the _Pequod_ there
+is determined, as by chance, a purpose for which her men did not sign,
+and which is not in her charter.
+
+But if we wish to criticize the book then we might as well try to
+analyse the precession of the equinoxes. The book defies the literary
+critics, who are not used to sperm whales. While reading _Moby Dick_
+you often feel that the author is possessed, that what he is doing is
+dictated by something not himself which compels him to use our accepted
+symbols with obliquity. You fear, now and then, that the sad and steady
+eye of the Ancient Mariner is on the point of flaring into a mania
+that may prophesy, or rave. His words go to the limit of their hold on
+the polite and reasonable. Yet they do not break loose. It is possible
+that we have not sufficient intelligence to rise to the height at which
+Melville was considered to be mad. After all, what is common sense?
+The commonest sense, Thoreau tells us, is that of men asleep, which
+they express by snoring; and we know that we ourselves might be thought
+a little queer if we went beyond the plain and verifiable noises in
+everybody’s language.
+
+But who has resolved poetry into its elements? Who knows what
+_Christabel_ means? And who knows why a book, which was neglected for
+seventy years, should be accepted to-day as though light had only just
+come through it? I suppose our thoughts have veered. Certainly of late
+years much has happened to change them; and when our thoughts change,
+then the apparitions change about us. We change our thoughts and change
+our world. We see even in _Moby Dick_ what was invisible to the people
+to whom the book was first given. On a winter’s night, only a year or
+two ago, I was intrigued into a drawing-room in a London suburb to hear
+a group of neighbours, who were men of commerce, discuss this book of
+Melville’s. They did so with animation, and the symptoms of wonder.
+It could not have happened before the war. Was some unseen door now
+open? Were we in communication with influences that had been unknown
+to us? I was greatly surprised, for I knew well enough that I and they
+would not have been found there, ten years before, discussing such a
+book. The polite discussion of accepted books is all very well; but
+this book was dangerous. One ought not, without due consideration, to
+set out at night from a suburban villa to hunt a shadowy monster in
+the sky. Heaven alone knows where they may lead us. And my wonder was
+the greater when a shy stranger there, who looked more like a bank
+manager than a South Sea Whaler, confessed during the discussion, quite
+casually, that Melville’s book reminded him of Macbeth. Of course,
+those knocks on the castle door! That was the very thought which had
+struck me. I looked at that man with awe, as though I was in the wake
+of the White Whale itself. I left that gathering much too late of a
+winter’s night for comfort, and a blizzard struck us. But what is a
+blizzard at midnight to a wayfarer who has just had happy confirmation,
+an unexpected signal amid the bewildering chaos and disasters of his
+time and culture, that he is in the dawn of another age, and that other
+watchers of the sky know of more light?
+
+
+VI
+
+The home-sick palm that was dying on the hotel verandah touched with
+a dry finger the coat sleeve of the man next to me. He picked up the
+leaf and idly rolled it like a cigarette. “Pleasant here, isn’t it?”
+he said. His eyes wandered kindly round the assembly of wicker chairs
+in that glasshouse. We were nearest to the door, and could feel what
+little air was stirring. A woman remarkable because her lips were a
+crimson imposition which did not restore youth to the seamed pallor of
+her face, and who wore a necklace of great lumps of amber, was giving
+chocolates to a spaniel at the next table.
+
+“Rum little face that dog’s got,” said the man. “Wonder what the next
+fad in dogs for ladies will be. That one can hardly breathe, and can’t
+walk.”
+
+He was amused, and touched his fair hair very lightly, for it was
+as accurately paraded as--I merely guess--his own platoon would be.
+His moustache was neat. His chin was in good taste. His eyes went
+seaward, where a turquoise space faded into a haze between two vague
+headlands, and at once he became alert and sat upright. He lifted his
+binoculars and scanned the Channel. “They’re destroyers out there,
+aren’t they?” he asked, as interested as though he hoped that truth had
+appeared in the offing. He carefully focussed his glasses. “And that’s
+a Dreadnought, I’m sure.” Yes, they seemed to be destroyers, and the
+other a battle cruiser.
+
+The saturnine yachtsman, the best bridge-player in the hotel, in white
+duck trousers and a reefer jacket, whose yacht had not yet arrived,
+joined us. He said gravely, as though confirming news that was
+important, but till he spoke was improbable, that they were destroyers
+and a battle cruiser. They were, he remarked, of the latest type of
+destroyer. The French had nothing so good.
+
+The lady with the dark lips left her dog and came to look seaward. “Are
+they really warships? How thrilling. What are they doing?”
+
+We did not tell her. We did not know. But that cheerful and
+irrepressible fellow, who often intrudes an unfortunate comment which
+is always followed by his own laughter, though we never speak to him,
+blithely answered the lady. “What are they doing? Wasting taxes,” he
+said, and laughed, of course.
+
+The yachtsman, whose ship was late, turned wearily and left us, the
+young man with the disciplined hair wound the strap round his glasses
+as though he had heard nothing, and the lady went to stop the noise her
+dog was making, for the old fellow sitting with his nurse was glaring
+malignantly at the spaniel over his shoulder.
+
+“Only thing against this place is, one can’t get any golf,” my young
+friend complained, and began to hum a tune that was popular about
+the bandstand. He continued to look out to sea; his eyes avoided the
+asphalted promenade where the charabancs assembled. The beach was
+out of sight, but it must have been crowded, for a multitude of
+air-balloons swayed above it. Shrill far-off cries came from there.
+“Sounds as if the sea-serpent were among the girls,” said the young
+man. “Let’s go and look.”
+
+We strolled over. We leaned on the iron rails of the concrete wall and
+looked down on the holiday-makers. The beach was sunk beneath deck
+chairs and recumbent forms. The incoming tide was compressing the
+multitude against the sea wall, and two more pleasure-seekers could
+have found no place down there.
+
+“That nipper--that one in the red varnished breeches--he seems to have
+all the sand there is.” My friend pointed to a child with a toy bucket
+beneath. “Doesn’t look too golden, does it?”
+
+Our eyes roved. “I say, look at this fellow,” pleaded my companion
+and nudged me. A man stood near us leaning on the rail. He was
+surveying the people from the cities taking their pleasure. It was a
+lumpy figure, in rough clothes, in old velveteen riding breeches, and
+leggings that were almost globular. His cap, perched well forward on a
+tousled black head, gave him a look of crafty loutishness. His jowl was
+purplish and enormous, and that morning’s razor had polished it. The
+light actually glinted on the health of that broad mask, which was as
+solid and placid as that of an animal.
+
+“Pretty bovine, that fellow. Genuine bit of local clay all right,” my
+friend whispered. “Shouldn’t like to upset him, though. Look at his
+blessed arms!”
+
+But I had, when they were bare. They are chestnut in colour, and swell
+in an extraordinary way when they haul on a seine net or a bogged wagon.
+
+“If I knew how long it would take him to think about it I’d ask him
+what he thinks of this crowd. Anyhow, the poor fellow wouldn’t last
+five minutes in the place where these people come from.” Some joyous
+screams from the water appeared to confirm this. Perhaps the quick wits
+of the merry folk below had divined even our thoughts. The bovine face
+stared on, its chin projecting a pipe.
+
+“He looks healthy enough,” commented my friend, “but the clay has got
+into his system. Do you think he has a rational opinion about anything?
+What makes him move about?” At that moment the man slowly raised
+his bulk, looked steadily at his pipe for some moments, then peered
+seawards, and went away, without a glance at us.
+
+I saw him again some miles from the hotel, where he stood at the end of
+a path that led up to his farm, beside a patch of lusty hog-weed which
+was as tall as himself. He nodded, and grinned.
+
+“Had enough of that place? I been back some time. Thought the wind was
+shifting.” He glanced up at the cirrus with his piggy eyes. “Ought to
+be mackerel in the bay this evening. Think I can smell ’em. Water looks
+like mackerel.... Are you passing Jimmy Higgs? Tell him to get the
+crew. Pretty good catch, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ll be the first
+boat.
+
+“I’ll be along by the time you’re ready,” he said, turning away. “Got
+the cows to see to now.” He jerked his thumb towards the distant
+holiday-makers. “Nothing for them to eat unless we see to it.”
+
+
+VII
+
+The farmhouse with its outbuildings, all built of a mellowed limestone,
+from a little distance could have been only an exposure of the bare
+bones of the hillside. The group of grey structures were formless till
+the sun was through the mist that morning and touched the lichened roof
+of the house into a rectangle of orange light. That was the sign that
+it was a human habitation, for weathered buttresses and grey hummocks
+of rock are not infrequent on the slope above our walled garden by the
+shingle. The gaunt ribs of the earth show through its thin turf and
+shaggy tufts of furze and bracken. It surprises a visitor that England
+should look so abandoned and desolate, yet so bright and tranquil.
+
+But desolation is not the same as darkness. The life on those steep and
+barren uplands is abundant; and, though useless, it evidently springs
+from the original fount, which seems to be as full as at the beginning.
+Nothing, we discovered, as we climbed to the moor, had been withheld
+from the bracken because it is an unprofitable crop. It was a maze,
+too, of the dry tracks of wild creatures, as though it were a busy
+metropolis the citizens of which were all absent for the day. The day
+now was radiant. The furze, which made vivid islands of new green and
+gold in wide lakes of purple, for the heather was in bloom, suggested
+that we have yet to learn the full meaning of profit. It was tough as
+well as effulgent, and hinted of staple crops for uses beyond any that
+figured in the news of the day. Those crops are not quoted. Perhaps we
+know less about markets than we thought. The morning was so good that
+one felt nonsensical.
+
+Yet, as the visitor from London said to me: “What markets are you
+talking about? Don’t be absurd. And what good would they be to us if
+we knew them?” He wanted no transcendental nonsense, which was only
+a lazy trick to escape from the facts. Bracken and furze, in modern
+society, were enemies to be abolished. They were in the way. They
+ought to be mutton and butter. He regarded any other view of them as a
+fantasy, which had no validity except to the sentimental. “Of course,”
+he said, pausing, as we reached the height, at the surprise of broad
+valleys and hills beyond, “I enjoy this as much as you do. It’s a fine
+day, so far--though something is working up in the southwest, by the
+look of it.” He swept an arm of happy understanding over the peace and
+splendour of the earth. “All that is lovely merely because we have
+agreed to call it so. That’s its full title to loveliness. It does not
+exist in its own right. When we choose to change it into something
+different we shall. That right belongs to us. The dyes of those flowers
+come of fortuitous chemistry, and the forms of those hills of the
+chance of upheaval, the textures of the rocks, and the weather. We call
+the colours lovely and the forms of the hills noble. That is only our
+view of it. They are promoted to the titles we give them.” We strode
+on, the gods of the earth to which we could give any shape we chose. It
+certainly was a fine day.
+
+He thought, indeed, this visitor, that the fact that we enjoyed a fine
+day was its sole justification. As to the gold of the furze, those
+bushes would as soon see us perish of exposure under their thorns
+as exhilarate us with their new gold. And we could please ourselves
+about it. It did not matter to the furze bushes whether we perished or
+admired. And those cushions of rosy heath, pendant in half-circles over
+a scar in the ground where white flints were set in buff-coloured earth
+which seemed self-luminous, what were they but an aesthetic arrangement
+of our own? In themselves they were nothing. They were not related to
+anything, except to what was in our own minds. We made them rational
+because we preferred them so. But the moor was not anything in reason
+at all. Perhaps that lovely arrangement had never been noticed before,
+and the chance brush-work of the next storm might obliterate the
+beautiful irrelevancy for ever. Then where would it be?
+
+I had no answer to make. There is no answer to be made that is valid
+for all of us. The arrangement of rose, white and buff continued its
+irrelevant appeal, without any additional emphasis to assist its dumb
+case. The sun was warm. The air, when it stirred, smelt of herbs. The
+critic’s little daughter, who might have been listening to her seniors
+giving this world the reasons for its existence, she, too, made no
+sign. She was merely unquestionably bright and good, like the rose and
+gold, and smiled like the sun, without a word.
+
+Possibly the critic was right. There was no sense in it all. Only our
+own well-being assured us the moorland was good; the coincidence was
+happy. “Wait and see what the place is like when the weather changes,”
+he said.
+
+It changed. A fog drifted in from the sea. One hill-slope would be
+shining and its neighbour expunged. The time came when all the distant
+view had dissolved. The light went out of the colours. As we tried to
+find our way home in the growing murk it was noticeable that there
+were more thorns than gold to the furze. The tracks confused us. They
+were not made by creatures having our rational impulses. They lead
+nowhere. As we came round an old tumulus an object moved ahead of us.
+It vanished, unrecognised, in the mist. It left behind a dead rabbit.
+We were sorry to have missed a sight of that fox.
+
+Its victim had only just died. Its moist eye looked up at us,
+apparently in bright understanding. We examined it, admired its soft,
+warm fur, and then we left it, in an unattractive huddle, on the turf.
+“We could continue our little discussion on nature,” he said, “with
+that murdered rabbit as a text, couldn’t we? Not so pretty as the
+purple heather?” He smiled while waiting for my answer.
+
+I looked back at the victim. The critic’s little daughter was stooping
+over it, tenderly setting bunny in comfort under the shelter of a bush.
+Her compassionate figure was all I could see in the fog behind us.
+
+
+VIII
+
+What particularly attracted me, this autumn morning, was a blade of
+grass under the tamarisk hedge. There are not many such mornings,
+even in the best of years. It was as though the earth were trying to
+restore one’s faith completely for the winter, so that the soul should
+hibernate in security and repose--live through hard times, as it were,
+on the bounty of this gift of fat. The branches of the tamarisk,
+usually troubled, for they face the Atlantic, were in complete repose.
+Their green feathers were on young stems of shining coral. The sea was
+as placid as a lower sky. On some days here, even a modern destroyer,
+making for shelter, looks a poor little thing, utterly insignificant,
+an item of pathetic flotsam in a world which treats it with violent
+derision; indeed, the treatment is greatly worse than that, for it
+comes obviously of magnificent indifference to man the disturber and
+destroyer. It is as much as you can do to keep your glasses fixed in
+concern on that warship, which now and then is cruelly effaced. For our
+English seas are as fickle as is faith in the winds of doctrine.
+
+But on this morning a sheldrake, diving about in five fathoms just off
+shore, was more noticeable than a fleet of ships would be on other
+days. When he dived he sent rings over the blue glass. The sea was
+like that. The distant cliffs were only something about which you were
+quite sure, yet but faintly remembered. It was easy to believe news
+had arrived that morning which we should all be glad to hear, and that
+somehow the sheldrake had heard the word already. And there was that
+blade of grass under the tamarisk. There were many blades of grass
+there, of course, but this one stood out. It topped the rest. It was
+arched above its fellows. Its blade, of bluish green, was set with
+minute beads of dew, and the angle of the sunlight was lucky. The blade
+was iridescent. It glittered from many minute suns. It flashed at times
+in a way to which grass has no right, and the flashes were of ruby and
+emerald. You may search up and down Bond Street with the ready money in
+your pocket, and you will not find anything so good. Yet I could not
+collect my treasure. I had to leave it where I found it. Is treasure
+always like that?
+
+I abandoned it, feeling much more confident and refreshed than ever I
+do when a book of philosophy confirms, with irrefragable arguments,
+some of my private prejudices, and sat on a hummock of thyme to watch
+the sheldrake. Then a man of letters came and sat beside me. I did
+not tell him about my feast of grass. What would have been the good?
+I did not recall that that kind of refreshment is down in any book;
+for Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt on grass, we may recall, was somewhat
+different. We began, instead, to talk of Bond Street, or rather, of
+literary criticism, about which I know nothing but my prejudices; and
+they, possibly, were found somewhere in the neighbourhood of that
+street, and therefore have no relationship to the morning dew. I
+noticed that the critic himself seemed unsettled that morning, though
+whether the blue of the sky had got into his head to change the Oxford
+blue, or whether he, too, had been feeding on honeydew, it is not for
+me to say. One should never, except with a full sense of the awful
+implication, call another person mad; for the improvident beauty of the
+world, placed where we either miss it, or destroy it, might serve as
+evidence of the madness of God. It is possible that we may even lightly
+blaspheme when we call a strange fellow a little mad. Nevertheless,
+the critic’s words at least startled me. He was tying a knot in a stalk
+of thrift, and he remarked casually: “It seems to me you can bring
+all art down to one test.” He gave me that test, which is a passage
+beginning “Consider the lilies of the field.”
+
+Perhaps we had better not. Perhaps a consideration which began with a
+lily might tarnish, if it were allowed, more than the glory of wise
+kings. To begin with such a challenge to one’s opinions is unwise,
+because it would not allow the consequent argument a chance to find
+approval for the things we most admire. But evidently those lilies of
+the field were of importance to the commentator who once begged his
+fellow-men to consider them, or objects so common by the wayside could
+not have been marked by him in favour. He so exalted those common weeds
+that they diminished, though that was not their aim, the cherished
+national tradition of a great monarch. Is that an approach to a just
+criticism of art? It may be so. After that accidental discovery of
+the wasted treasure behind me it was impossible to reject at once so
+disastrous a theory. I am almost prepared to believe there may be
+something in it. It is possible that scientific critics, who judge by
+fixed criteria of analysis and comparison, and who are startled as
+much by a show of life in a book as an anatomist would be if the corpse
+moved under his knife, had better regard it; unless, like the girl
+in melodrama, they would prefer to take the wrong turning. I heard a
+farmer the other day calling this a bad year. But what did he want?
+If he had climbed out of his fields to where the young green and gold
+of the furze was among the purple heather he would have seen that the
+fount of life was just as full as ever.
+
+Seaward there is only light, and the smoke of a distant steamer low
+down. The westerly gales have ceased at last, as if there were no more
+reason to bring ships home to a land that not long ago was populous,
+but now is not. The smoke of that steamer in the southwest remains as a
+dark blur, the slowly fading memory of a busy past, long after she must
+have lifted another landmark. In all the wide world, from the beach as
+it is to-day, that distant trace of smoke is the only sign of human
+activity.
+
+In the frail shine of this autumn morning, reminiscent and tranquil,
+the broad ridge of shingle, miles long, the product of centuries of
+storms, appears unsubstantial. There are, on its summit and terraces,
+mirages of blue pools and lakes where no water can be. No breakers
+explode on it to-day. The sea is a rigid mirror. The high downs behind
+the shingle, that have been dark with an antiquity of heather, tumuli,
+and frowning weather, are happily released to the sky, and are buoyant
+as though raised by an inner glow.
+
+Not many days in the year are like this. Two, or three? And the
+resemblance of our own coast to a southern shore is now remarkable. The
+old wall of the steading behind the beach is not merely whitewashed.
+That wall’s brightness this morning might be, like moonshine, the
+assurance of what once stood there. Only the dark feathers of tamarisk
+above it pretend to substance, and they are drowsy after the buffeting
+of a wild summer, and bend asleep over the wall. That secluded place
+has grown familiar to me, but on a day like this, with the strong
+smell of decaying sea litter--long cables of pulse have been laid
+along the shingle by continual hard weather--and my footsteps the only
+sound, I approach that wall as if it were an undiscovered secret on
+an unfrequented strand of the Tortugas. No need to go out of England
+for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we make it. Chance
+releases it; some unexpected incidence of little things. The trouble is
+to know it in time, when we see it. If we are not ready for it, then it
+is not there.
+
+This morning I had the feeling that I was much nearer that fellow in
+the round barrow above the steading, whoever he used to be, than ever
+I felt on a glum day. Such autumn light as this is mocking. When the
+weather is overcast the tumulus is deeply sundered by time, but a
+September sun makes yesterday of it. Almost hidden in the fig-wort and
+hemp-agrimony of a dry ditch behind the shingle is a rusty globe, a
+dead mine of the war, and from an embankment above it I picked out a
+flint arrowhead; or rather, to-day’s odd and revealing shine betrayed
+it to me there. But in the gay and mocking light of such a morning both
+weapons belong to the same time in man’s short history. They were used
+in the same war. They will be separate from us, and both will become
+equally ancient, when we are of another mind and temper. When will that
+be? We may have to maintain ourselves in such light as this, regardless
+of the weather.
+
+For what this oblique light makes clear is that there is a life and a
+tendency which goes on outside our own, and is indifferent to our most
+important crises. It is not affected by them. No doubt it affects us;
+but we do not often surmise that. It is lusty and valid, and we may
+suppose that it knows exactly what it is about. We may be too proud in
+our assurance that this other life has a less authentic word about its
+destiny than has been given to us. At sunrise to-day, on the high ridge
+of the shingle which rose between me and the sea, six herons stood
+motionless in a row, like immense figures of bronze. They were gigantic
+and ominous in that light. They stood in another world. They were like
+a warning of what once was, and could be again, huge and threatening,
+magnified out of all resemblance to birds, legendary figures which
+closed vast gulfs of time at a glance and put the familiar shingle in
+another geological epoch. When they rose and slowly beat the air with
+concave pinions I thought the very Heaven was undulating. With those
+grotesque black monsters shaking the sky, it looked as though man had
+not yet arrived. Anyhow, he was a mere circumstance--he could come
+and go--but a life not his persisted, and was in closer accord with
+whatever power it is that has no need to reckon time and space, but
+alters seas and continents at leisure.
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE PLACE WE KNOW BEST
+
+
+It is an ancient notion that the earth never forgets any of our
+thoughts and acts. When we leave home not to return, it bears us in
+mind. Man has long entertained this strange and disturbing thought.
+The old metaphysicians, who could always come to any conclusion they
+desired, hinted the same opinion, that we leave an impress on the
+air; or something as substantial as that. And why should we deny it?
+It would be unreasonable to expect a seal upon the invisible to be
+discernible, and just as unreasonable to deny its existence because it
+could not be seen. We cannot declare our record is not there; but it
+will never be apprehended by insensitive souls, we may safely assume,
+any more than the Absolute, or the other unseen abstractions which seem
+to shrink from the coarse contact of our senses. We may not expect a
+memory haunting a place to reveal itself even when our mood is right,
+and the hour. It may not be sought, we are told. Like Truth, it cannot
+be proved. It comes when we are not looking for it. It is never more
+precise than a sudden doubt, a wonder apparently unprovoked, a surmise
+which abruptly checks our well-ordered activities.
+
+Well, it is a novel kind of ghost story, and perhaps it has as much
+in it as most ghost stories, for it was a sceptic who declared sadly
+that the trouble with a ghost is that there is no ghost. We know there
+are many people who do not rejoice in the thought that we leave no
+lasting impression on our circumstances. They do not consider the
+greater responsibility a certainty of this memory of earth for its
+children would put upon us. How we should have to sublimate even our
+emotions, if we would give an admirable impression! The nascent terror
+at the bare suggestion of it reminds us that the experience is not
+uncommon, on entering a strange room, or looking at an empty landscape,
+to feel there the shadow of an abiding but inexplicable remembering.
+We never know why. Mr. de la Mare, in his poem _The Listeners_, has
+given this sense of the memory of an old and abandoned house; and
+it would be as wrong to smile at the delicate intuitions of a poet
+because they are too subtle as to deny the revolutionary reasoning of
+Einstein because his argument moves on a plane beyond our attainment.
+It is unfortunately natural for us to limit the possibilities of the
+universe, the depth of its mystery, to what we are able to make of it;
+for the things we do not know can exist for us only when we do know
+them and so may admit they are there. When we declare we see clearly
+all there is to be seen it seldom occurs to us that, even then, we may
+be but confessing to a partial blindness.
+
+It is true that the real mystery of the ghosts is not that they startle
+us but that they do not. Not worth the trouble? Perhaps they are aware
+we will maintain a vague belief in their presence only so long as
+they do not show themselves. I myself find it easy to accept Mr. de
+la Mare’s _Listeners_, but not the pair of evil souls who appear in
+Henry James’ _Turn of the Screw_. I have always felt that we ought not
+to have been allowed to see those maleficent spirits, and that it was
+a defect in the story, a concession to our crudity, that they were
+ever produced by their author as substance for his case. For we may
+suppose that anything so imponderable as a memory the impassive earth
+retains of the past will suggest itself only to the lucky, who may
+make of their luck what they will. Most probably they will give their
+good fortune a false interpretation. But what opportunities the notion
+offers! What entertaining history could be made of it, if there were
+anyone to write it! What poetry, if we were poets!
+
+There is my own London suburb. After a walk round it, which would take
+too much time, and would be very wearying, we might estimate that,
+counting even its invisible shadows, it is not more than fifty years
+old. The taxpayers there have some right to suppose that they know the
+best and worst of it. It is an uproar of trams and motor-traffic in the
+midst of hotels, restaurants, and ornate drapers’ shops. An alien might
+suppose we devoted our whole lives to the buttoning and unbuttoning of
+clothes and getting something to eat, until he saw the gilded stucco in
+an Oriental style of architecture, the minarets and domes, of our many
+picture palaces; for, after all, we have our intellectual excitements,
+and the newsboys at the street-corners are anxious that we should never
+grow listless.
+
+It would be foolish to deny it. Our suburb seems raw and loud. Yet in
+recent years it acquired an area where a shower of bombs fell from an
+airship. History at last? No, we have some history which is earlier
+than the airship, though less remarkable. We have some scholarly
+local insistence on Clive, who went to school near, and on Ruskin,
+whose grandmother kept a public-house near the High Street. We have a
+Fellmongers’ Yard, and a Coldharbour Lane, a tavern which can claim
+a Tudor reference, and a building, mainly of the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries, and known to us as the Old Palace. Naturally,
+Queen Elizabeth slept there. She did in most places. Here, however, she
+really did sleep, and her most unqueenly ingratitude to her anxious
+host, expressed when she departed, is on record. We delight in the
+irregular mass of the Old Palace, with its little colony of rooks in
+the trees beside it; yet our delight in it comes, I think, because its
+memories of Tudor archbishops are associated, as we pass it, with the
+singing and the play of our neighbours’ children, for the Palace to-day
+is a school of theirs. We think more fondly of the children than of
+the old ecclesiasts. They give us something more beautiful to think
+about. Yet--the doubt is insistent--though we know well enough our
+libraries are full of the solemn nonsense which historians have made
+of their illusions and prejudices, is there a phantom more misleading
+than the visible Fata Morgana of our own day, our own illusion, which
+men of affairs call Things as They Are? For what are they? Dare we say
+we know more about them than we know of the Pyramids, the Cretans, and
+the wanderings of the Polynesians? Is the last comment on it all the
+laughter of children?
+
+Our suburb seems so raw. It has been reduced to figures on a chart,
+which the Town Hall will supply. But I have long had a suspicion that
+it has secrets which it is not sharing with such latecomers as we are.
+This feeling has come over me, with chilling irrelevance, when I have
+been passing our parish church late at night. Nobody knows when a
+church first stood here, but it had a priest in 986. Late at night, our
+own suburb suggests oddly that it is not ours, that its real existence
+is in a dimension unknown to its sleeping citizens. I have wondered
+then whether it was possible to write the history of any place, of any
+time. Can we ever do more than make a few suggestive speculations?
+Perhaps the most important happenings are always omitted; the words
+with which we record an air-raid may not touch them. I know that the
+history of my own little street, during the few years of the war, could
+never be written, and if it were written it would be unbelievable. For
+no man could so translate my street of those years for all to see its
+significance, unless his imagination were like a morning sun which
+rose to reveal the earth that night had obscured. Our street doors are
+closed forever upon what happened behind them in those years. Unless
+their history is written on the invisible air, then it is lost.
+
+For this unreasonable certainty I can offer no evidence more
+substantial than the last train home, and moonlight on the trees and
+battlements of the church, and the silence, and a gargoyle leering down
+at me from a porch. He might have been caught in the act of sardonic
+comment on what was passing below, out of a fuller knowledge, and a
+longer life. I can bring myself to believe that the gargoyle does not
+grin at me at night without reason. He knows something. He always did.
+But what is it? Why should he make me wonder whether I really know my
+own street? One comes home at midnight, with the mind revolving round
+London’s latest crisis; and for a wonder my suburb does not share the
+excitement of the city. It is sunk in an immemorial quiet. The church
+and the Old Palace might be the apparition of what was beyond us and
+above the anxieties which make our time spin so fast. It is not their
+time. Our contemporary bricks and mortar have assumed a startling
+look of venerable and meditative dignity. Our familiar place is free
+to compose itself in solitude, for we have withdrawn from it, noisy
+children who have gone to bed. It looks superior to me, when I surprise
+it at such a time, but it does not betray its knowledge. It spares no
+more than the ironic comment of the gargoyle.
+
+I think I can guess a little of what is behind that imp’s grimace.
+Opposite to my house is a wall. It has no history. It is but a matured
+wall, and its top is hoary with lichens and moss. This year’s leaves
+are now littering the ground below. But I have seen our young men
+assemble there, and march off for the Yser. This year’s leaves are
+damp and sere on the path by the wall where the young men shuffled off
+in the ominous quiet of that forgotten winter dawn. But what do the
+new people in our street see when they gaze across to that old red
+brickwork on a bright autumn morning? There the dead leaves are. What
+is history? One may guess why the ancient imp by the church porch has
+that grin when chance wayfarers late at night look up, and find he is
+watching them pass. Does he know where they are going, and why, and is
+he grinning over his secret?
+
+
+
+
+VIII. DROUGHT
+
+
+The pond at the end of the row of cottages was reduced to little more
+than a margin of yellow mud, tough as putty. The mud framed an oval of
+green slime, which might have been solid, for several tin cans were
+resting on it, unable to sink. The cottages were hoary with the dust of
+constant motor-traffic, and the small strip of paled ground in front of
+each was a desert in which nothing but a few tall hollyhocks survived.
+
+The market-gardener, whose tanned face made his beard as delicate as
+snow, and gave his pale blue eyes a disconcerting beauty, stood at the
+gate to the gardens just beyond the pond. Over the gardens, held aloft
+so that the passengers on the motor-buses from London could see it, was
+a new notice-board announcing that freehold building plots were for
+sale.
+
+A stack of bricks was dumped on the potatoes near the notice-board.
+The gardener saw that I had observed this novelty in the village, and
+turned his head and glanced that way. He crinkled his eyes at the
+bricks in ironical disfavour. “That’s the first lot,” he said. “Can’t
+be stopped now. Better look round if you want to remember us. Wonderful
+how things move, once they start. One time, nothing much along here but
+farm wagons. Now you must hurry, crossing this here road. Specially
+Sundays. London ain’t far away now.”
+
+“It never was very far, was it?”
+
+“It was all right where it was. I never thought,” he mumbled, “that
+anyone ’ud want to live here, except us folks. I almost wish I’d
+guessed it long ago. Might have bought this field. Never gave it a
+thought. Rent was cheap. I could only think of the green stuff, and
+that’s how we get caught, attending to one thing. You city folks are
+too quick.”
+
+“No, we’re not. It’s the years that are quick. We get hurried along and
+pushed out, and most of the time we don’t know where we are.”
+
+“Well. Maybe. But here you are. Seems as though them motor-buses
+blasted even the taters. ’Tisn’t only the dry summer. Everything
+lost heart after they put up that notice-board there. This place is
+different.”
+
+The old man took off his cap and put it on again. “Well, you come in
+and have a cup of tea, on the way down. Don’t go to the village hall
+and ask the young ’uns whether they like the difference. Sometimes I
+fancy the motors have served them like the taters.”
+
+At the end of the market gardens, where the contractors are assembling
+their material, a footpath passes some recent villas built in the Tudor
+style, with black planks, to represent timber work, embedded in cement,
+and begins a long ascent of the open downs. Above the last house you
+can see the upward track dwindle in the distance to a white thread,
+which is occasionally lost to sight. And, beyond, where that thread
+vanishes, a wood is a dark crown to the downs, but so remote, so near
+to the glaring sky, that the eye says it is inaccessible.
+
+The lower slopes of the upland have been worn by the holiday-makers.
+The relics of the last week-end picnic littered the dry grass. Nobody
+was in sight then. Nothing moved, except the air over the warm ground
+in the distance: the down, a light inflation of chalk, vast and still,
+might have been quivering under its spell. At least there was a hint
+of its eager and tremulous spirit under the iron control of its
+enchantment. You thought, when watching it, that you might presently
+see the earth change more rapidly, and that dilation increase or
+collapse. For the chalk country, with its faint hues and its clean
+rondures, gives a curious sense of buoyancy and volatility. That high
+and distant clump, that dark raft of trees, could be sweeping forward
+on an immense green billow. It might slither over and vanish.
+
+Above the litter of the picnic-makers the hill rose at a sharper angle.
+The dry herbage was as slippery as ice. That sharp slope appeared to be
+a barrier to the holiday folk. Their tide does not rise above it. Above
+that escarpment the life of the valley never flows; and, looking down
+from it, the market gardens in the valley bottom, with the tiny mark
+which was a notice-board adding insult to the injury of the potatoes
+in a dry season, were seen to be the less significant. They were of no
+extent. The village itself, even with the bright red rectangles of the
+villas which betrayed its growth, was obviously incidental. Above the
+escarpment, too, the wild crops on the down were superior to anything
+which afflicts cabbages. They knew nothing of a drought. As a cooling
+breeze passed over the body of the hill the silky herbage stirred like
+long brown fur. The skin of the earth was soft and healthy. It smelt of
+thyme and marjoram.
+
+And the wood, that raft on the crest of the billow of chalk, was
+reached at last. No drought was there. There was an outer wild of the
+smaller trees, guelder, wayfarer’s tree, white beam, holly, cornel
+and alder buckthorn, bound together with wild clematis, and brambles
+that sounded like dynamos with a multitude of bees. Inside the wood,
+wherever there was a clearing in the timber on a slope, the colours of
+the wild flowers fell away in a cascade. That seclusion might have been
+tranquil and confident with a knowledge kept secret from the fearful
+and anxious. Its life sang and hummed in innumerable tiny voices. It
+will last a long time, and it will not need to change. A yew kept a
+space for itself, a twilight area through which fell rods of light. One
+side of the yew was splashed by the sun, and then the sooty trunk was
+seen to be of madder and myrtle green. Its life, though ancient, could
+not have been more robust. In the shade of it a company of hover-flies
+were at play, as though they had been doing that from the beginning,
+and would do it forever. They poised motionless or slightly undulated,
+and gyrated sideways and vanished, to reappear instantly in the same
+place, atoms joyous and sure in a changeless world. Sometimes one of
+them was caught in a beam of light and then that morsel of life became
+a bubble of gold in the air. It went out. It appeared again. It could
+shine when it pleased.
+
+The ship of trees was actually afloat. Its course was set high in the
+tides of the ether. It only seemed motionless. The murmuring of its
+secret power could be heard, if you listened for it.
+
+
+
+
+IX. A RIDE ON A COMET
+
+
+In the beginning, I know there was nothing more unusual in the things
+about me than a motor-car standing by the entrance to a dull, palatial,
+and expensive hotel on the Devon coast. The time was near midnight. The
+world was only the hotel lights and the moan of the sea. I had been to
+an enthusiastic political meeting; so my complete adhesion, at first,
+to common clay, is proved. There was another town, thirty miles away in
+the dark of the moors, and thither would we go, if it could be done. I
+did not think it could, though I did not think much about it, being too
+tired.
+
+Standing near the car, which had a nose like a torpedo, was a young
+man; what resembled a young man. I must be careful, for I had never
+seen the fellow by daylight, and am now uncertain whether or not he
+could be seen by daylight. He was pulling on great fur gloves and,
+speaking quietly with suspicious modesty, he stinted nothing of his
+ability to get to any old place in these islands before the next
+dawn. He spoke with the calm certitude of a god who takes the sunward
+hemisphere of this earth in one glance, and takes that side of it
+which is lost to mortals sleeping there at night as but a span of his
+thumb in the stars.
+
+I asked him if he had ever been on this road before, for a doubt of
+the omnipresence of this dubious man prompted me. I knew what hills
+and bad places, even by day, lay between me and the town where I fain
+would be. “I expect so,” he murmured, as though disguising his voice;
+“I expect so, some time or another.” The matter then dropped. I asked
+no more questions. There were no more to ask, except concerning those
+exactions of time and space which mortals never question. With the soft
+indifference of the sleepy mind, I was willing to believe that some
+time or another, in eternity, the timeless being beside me had included
+in his planetary orbits this bit of country. His wheels had taken this
+ugly length of night road, which awed a pedestrian mortal like me, in a
+single revolution, while belated wayfarers there, horror-stricken, had
+listened open-mouthed (backs up against the hedge-banks) to the swift
+diminuendo of earthquake and eclipse.
+
+Yet I lifted my tired eyes for a glance at this young man to catch, if
+it were there, an unguarded hint of his inhuman origin. There was but a
+half-smile on his lean face, which should have warned me, but did not.
+He stood by the black bulk of his impassive chariot. A tremor did come
+over me; and so, while my homely feet were still planted indubitably on
+good mother earth, I looked about me there for the last time. Nothing
+stirred. There was nothing unusual; no omen, no portent. Earth was
+deeply embedded and asleep in night. It seemed so certain (and here
+I turned to my charioteer again to see his face) that, from where I
+stood, the other town was as sundered from me as one of the asteroids.
+Its glint was too remote in the void to be seen. Suddenly then I became
+awake and afraid, and would have pushed the Tempter from me, saying
+that I’d find a bed where I was for the night. But I was given no time
+to speak.
+
+“Get in,” said the uncertain smile; and I dropped into the soft cloud
+of his immaterial car. What had only looked like a dim carriage
+instantly shook with the suppressed dynamics of many horses, and shot a
+vast ray into the night, as might have been expected from a comet. The
+smile slipped in beside me. He moved his hand swiftly. We got off the
+earth.
+
+If any abroad there at that late hour saw a meteor falling, tail first,
+athwart the North Devon hills, they would have been surprised to know
+there was one mortal man astride that flying light, conscious, too,
+of his mortality, and wondering how deep his bones would be found
+when the aerolite was dug out afterwards by the curious. From my
+stellar seat--we flew low down over the earth--what I saw on my right
+hand was the huge shadow of a hill, with the thin bright rind of the
+new moon just above it. Very little below us was the shine of our
+comet, revealing a pale road pouring past, a road which made flying
+leaps upward at us, but never touched us. There was also a luminous,
+pale-green haze, streaming in the wind which roared past. I think it
+was hedges. It went by in never-ceasing undulations. We were always
+about to tear through it, but miraculously it avoided us. The paring
+of moon remained above the high shadow on the right. Sometimes the
+transparent apparitions of trees shaped before us; we were skimming the
+dark planet too close. Sometimes we were so low in our flight that we
+had to dive, roaring, under their lower ghostly branches, and soared
+when through them into the silence of the outer dark again.
+
+Once we alighted on earth, just brushing it in a swoop on the upslope
+of a hill, and then rolled up gently in a great light. It was then
+that, instead of flying luminous streaks, I could see stones and
+clods, rooted trees and hedges growing where they stood, and they all
+looked like handpainted scenery by limelight. We reached the hill-top,
+the smile beside me gave a demoniac hoot, and we shot out into space
+like a projectile, falling sheer to the nether stars. My hair rose on
+end in the upward rush of wind. I had had about enough of it. If we hit
+another body in the sky larger than ourselves....
+
+It seems to me someone on the meteor gave a loud cry--probably it was
+this deponent--for by our light I saw we were rushing at the earth
+again. So close did we go that we almost struck a cluster of white
+houses. It was a near thing. We missed them all, luckily, for we hit
+the place at the open end of a street, and so shot through and out,
+just below the roofs. I heard a scream there as the pallid walls reeled
+past us. The thing beside me hooted in derision. What did that smile
+care for the fears of mortals at awful portents in their village at
+night?
+
+At last I did not care, but in a mad and lawless mood, giving my soul
+to anarchy, began to enjoy it. Far ahead and below us in the dark sky
+there was a constant group of delicate stars, like the Pleiades, and
+I noticed that they grew in brightness and increased in numbers; and
+presently, beyond doubt, they were rushing at us. In a few seconds our
+meteor was in the cluster of them, missing them all again--our luck was
+astonishing--but before we got through them the motor stopped. There
+was a policeman standing under a hotel sign, and that hotel was mine. I
+got out of the car, crossed myself reverently, and turned to see what
+had brought me there. But the road was empty.
+
+
+
+
+X. REGENT’S PARK
+
+
+It is not so amusing as it used to be to watch lions and tigers in
+cages. We are beginning to feel that it is an unlucky plight for a
+respectable tiger to be pent within boards and iron bars while kind
+ladies throw biscuits and the gentleman with them smiles; for we know
+what would happen to the smile and the biscuits if the tiger were
+in the woods and coughed slightly not far away. There would be less
+beauty in the entertainment, it is true, if the Zoölogical Gardens
+maintained choice examples in cages of vitriol-throwers, child-beaters,
+market riggers, war-makers, spies, _agents-provocateurs_, and so on.
+Regent’s Park would have to be extended to hold so large and varied an
+exhibition of wild beasts. The most beautiful of murderers could never
+be compared for shape and grace with a good lion or jaguar. It may be
+said, therefore, that there is a subtle flattery in our caging of the
+finer and more dignified creatures.
+
+We should find no pleasure in looking upon a caged sneak-thief, though
+certainly we keep them in cages, when we catch them; but the lion,
+I have been assured, is almost invariably a perfect gentleman who
+prefers not to quarrel and fight, and will leave the presence of the
+other animal with a gun if he can do so with delicacy and honour.
+Perhaps it is excusable in us that we should enjoy looking upon so
+noble a creature in safety. I have heard him, when he was in a cage,
+quietly swearing while gazing into the distance and a Bank Holiday
+crowd was staring at him; and even the most uncharitable of Christians
+could forgive him his bad language in such circumstances. And I have
+heard the tiger, when he was not in a cage, cough in the place where
+there was no Bank Holiday crowd, and at night; and I learned then that
+the mind of man does not feel so proud as it does at other times.
+
+The lion, of course, knows nothing of the quantum theory; but perhaps
+most of our Privy Councillors are as innocent. If the test were made
+of most of us; if we were removed from the benefit of the accumulated
+knowledge of humanity, our knowledge which is kept growing, for love
+usually, by a few superior minds, we should not know how to make a
+fire without the matches of which we had been deprived. On the whole,
+probably we flatter the depth of that abyss between ourselves and the
+lower animals; and for the wolf who runs up and down his cage sullenly
+ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we do not exist, we are
+beginning to feel there is something to be said.
+
+I suppose it is too soon to say that for the dogfish and the conger
+eel. The darkened corridors and the silence of the New Aquarium at the
+Zoölogical Gardens, and the eerie light there of an existence beyond us
+in which undulating forms suggest that life may have meanings outside
+our understanding, are so salutary that you hear hardly a sound from
+the visitors. They move about, speaking in whispers, as though in the
+presence of the awful. I heard a boy laugh there, but even that was
+subdued; and we may expect, of course, to hear the chuckle of a boy on
+the Judgment Day. The boy laughed while he was watching a crab with
+claws like grappling irons walk on the sea floor of the Aquarium. It
+went craftily, on its toes, and not straightforwardly, but sideways,
+as though its aim were evil. A turbot was flat on the sand, pretending
+to be the floor, but the crab put a hook on him. The turbot started;
+but the crab went straight on to the back of the fish. The boy laughed
+at the obvious surprise of both of them, which showed in a frantic
+eruption. But even the laugh was uncanny, for it broke out unexpectedly
+in an inhuman privacy which might have been the antechamber to the
+unspeakable.
+
+Only an irreverent boy would find anything funny in such a place. There
+is no comic element, that we know of, under water. It is not surprising
+that visitors to the Aquarium are subdued, or that they feel pity
+for the few sea-birds which happen to be exiled there from the day.
+That pity shows the difference. Pity for birds in a great aviary is
+rare, and maybe it is unnecessary. That is a matter in which we should
+consult the birds, if ever we doubt our own generous hearts. But sorrow
+for birds confined to a dungeon in the dim light and silence where eels
+and octopuses are at home is instant and right. In a reverse way that
+sorrow proves that the theatrical effect of the new Aquarium is good.
+It is good. It is marred only by the presence of those birds, which is
+forced and unnatural.
+
+The recesses of the tanks, where antennæ are seen vibrating or
+exploring in the shadows, when the eye is accustomed to the hyaline
+indistinction, where sinuous figures are seen in apparition, or a pair
+of jaws that picture soulless destiny itself gulp spasmodically and
+incessantly, somehow challenge the soul in a way impossible to the most
+terrible lion. With what respect one stares at that inert and leathery
+length, the lungfish, for he is the link between the sea-bottom dark
+from which came all life, and those hill-tops which life now regards
+as suitable for select villas. It was fortunate for our speculative
+builders that somehow, when it was left stranded in drying mud, the
+ancestor of the lungfish was able to fashion his swimming bladder into
+an organ which made him independent of gills, and equipped him for a
+life in the sun, though it was only a suspended life. See what has come
+of it!
+
+It is not only the silence and the twilight of the Aquarium which are
+impressive, but the sense that no more than plate glass separates us
+from a frightful gulf of time. And consider the fascination of the
+octopus! Could there be anything more sinister than the cold stare of
+the eyes surmounting that bulging stomach? Yet watch it shoot through
+the water and alight upon a rock, tentacles and all, with a flowing
+grace never equalled by a young lady practising a courtesy for the
+Court. That, however, only adds to its attraction, curiously enough;
+because attractive it is, for a reason so natural in mankind, and yet
+so obscure and difficult to define, that to look for it might take
+us into the Antarctic of philosophy. I found the largest audience of
+the Aquarium at the tank of the octopus, patiently waiting for what
+satisfaction, joy, terror, horror, consternation, or what not, it
+could bestow. It is useless for the ladies to protest that they love
+the Angel fish better, or any of the banded and prismatic tropical
+forms of the Amazon or the coral reefs. I saw very few people at the
+tanks where those opalescent or enamelled creatures were proving that
+our finest artists in the fantasies of decoration are bunglers. No.
+The superior audiences were for the octopus, for the grotesque and
+carnivorous spinosities, and for the conger eel.
+
+
+
+
+XI. A DEVON ESTUARY
+
+
+I
+
+It was decided that someone must stand by the boat. There was an
+uncertainty about the tide, and there might be a need to moor her
+elsewhere. The other two members of the crew did not propose a gamble
+to decide which one of the three of us should stay with her while the
+other two went into the town. I was told off as watchman, at once and
+unanimously, and it was clear that in this the rest of the crew knew
+they were doing the orderly thing. Their decision was just. It was I
+who was to be left. It is the lot of the irresolute to get left, though
+sometimes the process is called the will of God. The boat, with me in
+it, was abandoned. The two of us had to make the most of each other for
+an indefinite time.
+
+Perhaps the boat, being a boat of character and experience, had no
+confidence in her protector, because after a spell of perfect quietude,
+in which I thought she slept, without warning she began to butt the
+quay wall impatiently. She was irritably awake. But I was not going
+to begin by showing docile haste when a creature named _Brunhilda_
+demanded my attention so insistently. Instead, I leisurely filled my
+pipe and lit it, took half-a-dozen absent-minded draws at it, and then
+went forward idly and lengthened the mooring-line. The boat fell asleep
+again at once.
+
+Our line was fast to a ring-bolt which possibly was in the old
+stonework of that quay wall when the ships which moored there were
+those that made of a voyage to America a new and grand adventure. That
+ring-bolt was rust, chiefly. Its colour was deep and rich. With the sun
+on it, the iron circle on its stem might have been a strange crimson
+sea-flower pendent from the rock over the tide. A precipitous flight of
+unequal steps ran from the top of the quay down its face to the water.
+The steps continued under the water, but I don’t know how far. They
+dissolved. Of the submerged steps I could not count below the sixth,
+and even the fourth and fifth were dim in a submarine twilight. The
+tread of the midway step, which was near my face and just below it, was
+uncertain whether it ought to be above water or sunk. Sometimes, when
+I looked that way, it was under a few inches of glass, but as I looked
+the glass would become fluid and pour noiselessly from it. Once when
+the glass covered it I noticed an olive-green crab was on the step,
+set there, as it were in crystal. When he darted sideways it seemed
+unnatural, and as if he were alive and free. It was when he moved that
+I began to suspect that many affairs, an incessant but silent business
+of life, were going on around me and under the boat.
+
+The water was as still and clear as the air. It seemed but little
+denser. It was only the apparition of water. It was tinted so faint a
+beryl that I know when my fingers touched it only because it was cold,
+and the air was hot. When first I glanced overside it was like peering
+into nothing, or at least at something just substantial enough to
+embody shadows. So I enjoyed the boat, which was tangible. The bleached
+woodwork of the little craft had stored the sun’s heat. Perhaps,
+though, it was full of the heat of past summers, even of the tropics,
+and its curious smells were memories of many creeks and harbours. It
+had been a ship’s boat. In its time it may have been moored to mangrove
+roots. It had travelled far. I don’t know when I enjoyed a pipe so
+much. The water was talking to itself under the boat. We were sunk
+three fathoms below the top of the quay, out of sight of the world. I
+could see nothing living but a scattered area of sea-birds resting on
+the tide. One of the birds, detached from his fellows, a black-headed
+gull, was so close that the pencilled lines of his plumage were plain.
+He cocked an eye at me enquiringly. He came still closer, of his own
+will or through the will of the tide--there was no telling--and we
+stared frankly at each other; and I think I may believe he admitted
+me as a member of whatever society he knows. Not a word was said, nor
+a sign made, but something passed between us which gave everything
+a value unfamiliar but, I am confident, more nearly a right value.
+This made me uncertain as to what might happen next. I felt I was the
+discoverer of this place. It was doubtful whether it had ever been seen
+before. I had accidentally chanced upon its reality. As to those stone
+steps, I had been up and down them often enough in other years, but I
+had the feeling they were new to me this morning, that they turned to
+me another and an unsuspected aspect. It was in such a moment that I
+first saw the crab at my elbow, and when he darted sideways it was as
+if he were moved by a secret impulse outside himself, the same power
+which moved the gull towards me, and which pulled the water off the
+step.
+
+I looked overside to see whether this power were visible, and what
+it was like. There were six feet of water between me and the wall,
+and its surface was in the shadow of the boat; but the sunlight, at
+the same time, passed under the keel of the boat, so between my craft
+and the wall I could see to a surprising illuminated depth. The steps
+that were submarine were hung with algæ; near the surface of the
+water their fronds were individual and bright, but they descended and
+faded into mystery and the half-seen. Some of the larger shapes far
+below, whatever they were, seemed to be in ambush under the boat, and
+what they were waiting for in a world so dim, removed, and strange, I
+preferred not to consider, on a fine day. Those lurking forms, which
+might have been nether darkness itself becoming arborescent wherever
+sunlight could sink down to it and touch its unfashioned murk into
+what was lifelike, were eternally patient and still, as confident as
+things may be which wait in the place where we are told all life began.
+Midway between the keel of the boat and that lower gloom a glittering
+little cloud was suspensory. Each atom of it in turn caught a glint of
+sunlight, and became for an instant an emerald point, a star in the
+fathoms. But I was not the first to detect that shoal of embryonic
+life. A pale arrow shot upwards from the shadows at the cloud, which
+instantly dispersed. That quick sand-eel missed his shot.
+
+That cloud was alive; the water and the dark forest below were
+populated. The impulse which kept the water moving on and off the
+step--by now it was using another step for its play, for the tide was
+falling--continued to shoot flights of those silver arrows into the
+upper transparency. They flew out of the shadows into the light and
+were back again quicker than the eye could follow them; and as casually
+as though they had known this sort of thing for æons, the morsels of
+life suspended in the upper light parted and vanished, to let the
+arrows through; then, as by magic, the glittering morsels reformed
+their company in the same place. No number of darting arrows could
+destroy their faith in whatever original word they once had been and
+the quay wall a vitreous hemisphere, a foot across. It had a pattern of
+violent hieroglyphics in the centre of its body. Its rim was flexible,
+and in regular spasms it contracted and expanded, rolling the medusa
+along. The creature darkened as it rolled into the shadow of the boat.
+It sank under me and was suddenly illuminated, like a moon, as it
+entered the radiance beneath. It was while watching it that I noticed
+in the water some tinted gold.
+
+There drifted into the space between the boat sparks which I was
+ready to believe came of the quality of the sea itself, for I could
+see the water was charged with a virtue of immense power. When the
+jellyfish had gone I watched one of those glims, for it was not doused
+at once, but merely changed its colour. It moved close to the boat.
+The sparkling came from a globe of pure crystal, which was poised in
+the current on two filaments. The scintillating globe, no larger than
+a robin’s egg, floated along in abandon in the world below my boat,
+sometimes bright in elfish emerald, and then changing to shimmering
+topaz. Scores of these tiny lamps were burning below, now that my
+eyes were opened and were sensible of them. They had been suddenly
+filled, I suppose, by the power which pulsed the algæ, which had
+turned the medusa into a bright planet, shot the arrows, opened my own
+intelligence, and given sentience to the other atoms of drifting life.
+The water was constellated with these little globes changing their
+hues, and I remembered then that Barbellion once said a ctenophore in
+sunlight was the most beautiful thing in the world....
+
+There was a shout above me. The crew had returned. It demanded to know
+whether I was tired of waiting.
+
+
+II
+
+We pushed out the boat, and four oars shattered the mirror and the
+revelation. Above the quay the white houses appeared, mounting a quick
+incline in chalk-like strata. They did not reach the ridge of the hill.
+The ridge was a wood dark against a cloud. Downstream, at the end of
+the ridge, our river is met by another. They merge and turn to go to
+sea. They become a gulf of confused currents and shoals in an exposed
+region of sandy desert, salting, and marsh, which ends seaward in the
+usual form of a hooked pebble bank. Beyond the bank and the breakers is
+a bay enclosed by two great horns of rock, thirty miles apart. The next
+land westward, straight out between the headlands, is America. A white
+stalk of a lighthouse stands amid the dunes, forlorn and fragile in
+that bright wilderness, a lamp at our door for travellers.
+
+But we went upstream. The tide here, however, penetrates into the very
+hills. The exposed coils of roots and the lower overhanging branches of
+oaks in precipitous valleys, which in aspect are remote from the coast,
+are submerged daily, and shelter marine crustacea; the fox-gloves and
+ferns are just above the crabs. Yet where we grounded our boat, six
+miles from the lighthouse, the western ocean was as distant a thought
+as Siberia. On this still midsummer afternoon our lonely creek was
+the conventional picture of the tropics, silent, vivid, and far. The
+creek--or pill, as the natives of the west country call it in their
+Anglo-Saxon--is, like all the best corners of the Estuary, uninhabited
+and unvisited. Perhaps the common notion of the tropics, a place of
+superb colours, with gracious palms, tree-ferns, and vines haunted by
+the birds of a milliner’s dream, originated in the stage scenery of
+the _Girls from Ko-ko_ and other equatorial musical comedies, to which
+sailors have always given their hearty assent. That picture has seldom
+been denied. What traveller would have the heart to do it? The sons
+of Adam continue to hope that one day they may return to the garden,
+and it would be cruel to warn them that this garden cannot be entered
+through the Malay Straits or by the Amazon or Congo. We ought to be
+allowed, I think, to keep a few odd illusions in a world grown so
+inimical to idle dreaming. For the jungle in reality is rather like
+mid-ocean where there is no help. The sea is monstrously active, but
+the jungle is no less fearful because it is quiet and still. It is not
+variously coloured. It has few graces. Once within its green wall,
+that metallic and monotonous wall, the traveller becomes daunted by a
+foreboding gloom, and a silence older than the memories of Rheims and
+Canterbury. The picture is not of Paradise, but of eld and ruin. You
+see no flowers, and hear no nightingales. Sometimes there is a distant
+cry, prompted, it might be guessed, by one of the miseries which Dante
+witnessed in a similar place. Yet whatever beings use equatorial
+forests for their purgatory, they remain discreetly hidden; Dante there
+could but peer into the shadows and listen to the agony of creatures
+unknown. The grotesque shapes about him would mock him with aloof
+immobility, and Dante presently would go mad. He would never write a
+poem about his experiences. I saw this when reading Bates’ _Naturalist_
+again, while the crew of the _Brunhilda_ gathered driftwood in a Devon
+creek to make a fire for tea. Bates does little to warn a reader that
+the forest of the Amazon is not a simple exaggeration of Jefferies
+_Pageant of Summer_. And what a book, I saw then, a man like Bates
+could have made of such a varied world as our Estuary. The range of
+life in this littoral, from the heather of the moors to the edge of
+the pelagic shelf where the continental mass of Europe drops to the
+abyss--a range, in places, of no more than ten miles--has not yet had
+its explorer and its chronicler. Yet I never saw in days of travel in
+the equatorial forest such hues and variety of form as were held in
+the vase formed by the steep sides of our little west-country combe.
+A cascade of rose, purple, yellow, white and green, was held narrowly
+by those converging slopes of bracken and oak scrub. That descent of
+colour was in movement, too, as a tumult would be, with the abrupt
+and ceaseless leaping and soaring of numberless red admiral, clouded
+yellow, peacock, fritillary and white butterflies. On the foreshore,
+where a tiny stream emerged from this silent riot, a cormorant on a
+pile was black and sentinel. Kingfishers passed occasionally, streaks
+of blue light. It was the picture of the tropics, as popularly imaged,
+but it was what travellers seldom see there.
+
+
+III
+
+If there is a better window in the world than my portlight in Burra I
+do not know it. I look out on space from that opening in the topworks
+of a village which at night is amid the stars and in daylight is at
+sea. My cubicle is shady, but the light outside may be bright enough to
+be startling when of a morning it wakes me. I sit up in bed, wondering
+whether our ship is safe. The portlight seems too high and bright. The
+eyes are dazzled by the very chariot-spokes of Apollo, and ocean can be
+heard beneath me, vast and sonorous. The senses shrink, for they feel
+exposed and in danger. But all is well. Our ship that is between the
+sky and the deep has weathered more than two thousand years, and no
+more has happened to it than another fine day. Burra has not run into
+the sun.
+
+From my bed to-day the first thing I saw was a meteor flaming alongside
+us. But my window kept pace with it. The speed of the streaming meteor
+was terrific, but it could not pass us. Soon the meteor was resolved
+into the gilded vane of a topmast; I understood that a strange ship
+had come in. Nothing but time was passing my window. Yet still I had
+no doubt that the light in the east beyond the ship’s vane, ascending
+splendid terraces of cloud to a choir which, if empty, was so monitory
+that one felt trivial and unprepared beneath it for any announcement by
+an awful clarion, was a light to test the worth of a dark and ancient
+craft like Burra. I listened for sounds of my fellow-travellers. They
+were silent. There was an ominous quiet, as if I were the first to know
+of this new day.
+
+Then I just heard some subdued talk below, and the sounds of a boat
+moving away. As the speakers drew apart they called aloud. Yeo was
+off to fish by the Middle Ridge. The shipyard began its monody. One
+hears the shipyard only when its work begins. That means we are all
+awake. Those distant mallets continue in a level, confident chant, the
+recognised voice of our village. But by the time breakfast is over the
+fact that Burra is still building ships is no more remarkable than
+the other features of the Estuary; the ears forget the sound. Only if
+it ceased should we know that anything was wrong. For a minute or two
+no doubt we should wonder what part of our life had stopped. But the
+hammering has not ceased here since the first galley was built, which
+was before even the Danes began to raid us. The Danes found here, we
+have been told, seafarers as stout as themselves, with ships as good
+as their own, and got the lesson that, if quiet folk always acted with
+such fierce promptitude and resolution when interfered with, then this
+would be an unlucky world for pirates.
+
+Yet have no fear. I am not going to write a history of Burra. There was
+a time when I would have begun that history with no more dubiety than
+would a man an exposition of true morality. But the more we learn of a
+place the less is our confidence in what we know of it. We understand
+at last that the very stones mock our knowledge. They have been there
+much longer. I do feel fairly certain, however, that absolute truth is
+not at the bottom of any particular well of ours. This village, which
+stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea
+and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think
+was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about
+it to-day is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching
+for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The
+clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out
+from my portlight to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may
+be something in that old legend of a great stone ship on an endless
+voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I
+never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We
+reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before,
+so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a
+celestial voyage, and God knows where. So I dare not assume that I have
+the knowledge to write up the log-book of Burra. I should very much
+like to meet the man who could do it. We certainly have a latitude and
+longitude for the aid of commercial travellers and navigators who want
+our address, and it is clear that they too, as they seem able to find
+us so easily, must be keeping pace with us; that they are on the same
+journey as ourselves to the same distant and unknown star; but when one
+night I ventured to hint this surmise, as a joke, to an experienced
+sailor who came in for a pipe with me, he said he had never heard of
+that particular star; all the stars he knew were named. He said it was
+easy for him to lay a course for Burra, anyhow, and to keep it, just
+by dead reckoning. Besides--he pointed out--how could a man learn his
+whereabouts from a star he didn’t know and couldn’t see? Yes; how could
+he? But it is no joke. That old mariner had never heard of the perilous
+bark which some men have to keep pumped watertight, and to steer in
+seas beyond all soundings by a star whose right ascension can be
+judged only by inference, and by faith that is sometimes as curiously
+deflected as is any compass.
+
+When taking bearings from my window, merely to get the time of day,
+I can see the edge of the quay below and a short length of it. That
+gives promise enough that Burra is of stout substance, and rides well.
+A landing-stage, a sort of stone gangway, is immediately under the
+window. Whoever comes aboard or leaves us, I can see them. At low
+tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach where ketches and
+schooners rest on their bilges, their masts at all angles. Corroded
+anchors and chains lie littered about. In summer-time I smell tar
+and marine dissolution. Morning and those stairs connect us with the
+fine things that the important people are doing everywhere. Open boats
+with lug sails bring gossips and the news from the other side of the
+water, and on market-day bring farmers and their wives with baskets of
+eggs, chickens, butter, and vegetables, and perhaps a party of tourists
+to gaze at us curiously and sometimes with disparagement. Few objects
+look so pleasant as a market-basket nearly full of apples, and with
+some eggs on top. Yet it is well to admit, and here I do it, that there
+are visitors who call Burra a dull and dirty little hole.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  _At low tide these stone stairs go down to a
+  shingle beach_--
+]
+
+Indeed, there is no telling how even my window in Burra will take a
+man. Once I brought a friend to sit with me, so that he could watch
+the ferry and the boats, the dunes on the far sides, and the clouds.
+I thought, with him as look-out astern, he could tell me when a ship
+came down river, and I could warn him when I saw a vessel appear at the
+headland (out of nowhere, apparently), and stand in for the anchorage.
+What more could he want? But he said the place was dead. He complained
+that nothing happened there.
+
+I don’t know what he wanted to happen there. It gives me enough to
+think about. I always feel that plenty is happening to me as I watch
+those open boats. When a Greek vase is the equal of one of them in
+grace it is the treasure of a national museum. But our men can build
+such craft in their spare hours. The human mind, confused still and
+thick with the dregs of the original mud, has clarified itself to that
+extent. It would not be easy to prove that man has made anything more
+beautiful than one of our boats. Its lines are as delicate and taut
+as a dove’s. It is quick and strong, and it is so poised that it will
+change, when going about, as though taken by a sudden temerarious
+thought; and then in confidence it will lift and undulate on a new
+flight. The balance and proportions of its body accord with all one
+desires greatly to express, but cannot. In that it is something like
+music. The deep satisfaction to be got from watching a huddle of these
+common craft, vivacious but with wings folded, and tethered by their
+heads to the landing-stairs, each as though eagerly looking for the man
+it knows, will send me to sleep in a profound assurance that all is
+well. For they seem proper in that world beyond my window, where there
+is the light and space of freedom. The tide is bright with its own
+virtue. The range of sandhills across the Estuary is not land, nothing
+that could be called soil, but is a promise, faint but golden, far in
+the future. You know that some day you will land there. But there is
+plenty of time for that. There is no need to hurry. It is certain the
+promise is for you. One may sleep.
+
+After dark, like a fabulous creature, Burra vanishes. There is little
+here then, except an occasional and melancholy sound. I have for
+companionship at the window at night only a delicate star-cluster,
+low in the sky, which is another village on the opposite shore. Maybe
+Burra too, is a star-cluster, when seen from the other stars, and from
+that distance perhaps appears so delicate as to make its indomitable
+twinkling wonderful on a windy night. There are a few yellow panes here
+after sunset, and they project beams across the quay, one to make a
+hovering ghost of a ship’s figure-head, and another to create a lonely
+bollard--the last relic of the quay--and another to touch a tiny patch
+of water which is lively, but never flows away, perhaps because the
+Estuary has vanished and it has nowhere to go. It prefers to stay in
+the security of the beam till morning.
+
+Now it is curious, but after dark, when our place has disappeared
+except for such chance fragments, and when to others we can be but
+a few unrelated glints among the other stars, that Burra is most
+populous, warm, and intimate. I see it then for what it is, a vantage
+for a few of us who know each other, and who are isolated but feel
+secure in the unseen and hitherto untravelled region of space where the
+sun has abandoned us. All around us is bottomless night. Our nearest
+neighbour is another constellation.
+
+
+IV
+
+I have learned at Burra that we townsfolk know nothing of the heavens.
+There are only wet days in the city, and fine. The clouds merely pass
+over London. They cross the street, and are gone. They cast shadows
+on us, they make the place dark, they suggest, with a chill, that
+there are powers beyond our borders over which even the elders of the
+city have no jurisdiction. The day is fine again and we forget our
+premonition; it was only the weather.
+
+The motor-buses are all numbered and their routes are known, but the
+clouds are visitations, unannounced and inexplicable; warnings, which
+we disregard, that in truth we do not know where our city is. We
+cannot distinguish one cloud from another, because the narrow measure
+of heaven for each street allows us but an arc of a celestial coast,
+or one summit of a white range; before that high continent has more
+than suggested its magnitude we see the bus we want, or go down a
+side-turning.
+
+Doubtless the meagre outlook of this imprisonment from the heavens
+must have its effect upon us. Our eyes go no more to the sky than
+they do to the hills. We have acquired, if we have not inherited, the
+characteristic of downcast eyes. Where there is no horizon there may be
+work, but no hope, and so we begin to see the way to account for the
+cynical humour of the Cockney. We say, in friendly derision, that they
+who look upwards more than can be justified by the rules of our busy
+community are star-gazers. When we look up, it is not to the hills, but
+to a post-office clock or the name of a street. The city has length and
+breadth, but no height, for the greater the elevation of its buildings,
+the lower its inhabitants sink.
+
+But in this Estuary I have changed that view of the world for one
+that is flooded with light. The earth, I can see, is a planet, a vast
+reflector. We look up and out from Burra, in the morning, to learn what
+is stored in the sky; and if there is a moon we look to the heavens
+at night to judge how the men at sea will fare, while we sleep. For
+the clouds here plainly rule our affairs; or they are the heralds of
+the powers which rule us. The clouds take the light of the sun, and
+translate it into the character of our luck. On a bright morning over
+this bay, when the happy and careless imagine that all is well, the
+wind will begin to back. We are not at once aware of the reason for
+it, but the colours fade from the earth and from one’s spirit. The
+light dims. The uplands, which had been of umber and purple, become
+that shadow of desolation from which men seek refuge. Scud like gusts
+of livid smoke blows in swiftly from the southwest over the hills. The
+clouds which follow it are dark and heavy, and so low that they take
+the ground, roll over and burst. The uplands vanish. The sea grows
+bleak and forbidding, and the cliffs, with their crags and screes, turn
+into a prospect of downfall and ruin.
+
+Yet when the wind is easterly, then the polish of the bay is hardly
+tarnished, the clouds are high and diaphanous veils, and there is no
+horizon, for sea and sky are merged as one concavity of turquoise. When
+the morning is of easterly weather and still, the sea floor about the
+boat is distinct in several fathoms, and the mind floats so buoyantly
+and confidently midway in space that it feels there is no human problem
+which could not be solved by a happy thought.
+
+One afternoon the wind had been cool, for it came from the north of
+north-west; then, long before its hour, the sun vanished behind a
+veil. The wind fell with the sun. The world was without a movement,
+except for the languid and distant glinting of the breakers on the bar.
+The sea had the burnish of dull metal. The distant headlands were but
+faint outlines, and they might have been poised aloft, for there was
+as much light under them as above them. A steamer was passing from one
+headland to another, but whether it was sailing the heavens to another
+planet, or was going to America, it was hard to say. There were no
+clouds. There was only a vague light which was both sea and sky. In
+this indeterminate west, where the sun would then have been setting,
+was a group of small islands of pearl, not marked on the chart, where
+no islands ought to have been seen. They were too lofty and softly
+luminous to be of this earth; they floated in a threatening cobalt
+darkness. The day was a discernible presence, but it was ghostly; and
+I wish I could guess its origin, and why it stood over us, pale and
+silent, while we waited fearfully for a word that did not come.
+
+
+V
+
+On the shore of the dunes, which are across the Estuary from Burra,
+few boats ever ground. There are shoals, and a conflict of tides and
+currents, and then the surf. And why should a boat put over? Nothing
+is there but the lighthouse and the sand. Nor is it easy to approach
+it from the habitable land to the east, for after a long and devious
+journey by ferry and road to avoid the arm of the sea, you come first
+to a difficulty of marsh and dyke, and then to the region of the dunes.
+That journey takes all the best of the daylight, for you could not
+hurry if you knew every yard of the way, which nobody does; and then,
+once caught in the brightness and silence of the desert of sandhills,
+the need to hurry is forgotten.
+
+It is one of the days with a better light when your boat grounds on
+that shore. You may begin to walk the beach along the firm wet sand by
+the breakers, but you cannot keep to it. Something which calls, some
+strange lump among the flotsam stranded on the upper beach, draws you
+towards the sandhills. It looked, you imagined, like a man asleep, with
+a dark blanket over him; but it proved to be only a short length of a
+ship’s spar covered with bladder-wrack. There is no returning then.
+Once you reach that line of rubbish it is the track you follow, the
+message you try to read. A baffling story, though, made of words from
+many stories, separated, partly erased, muddled by the interruption
+of storms, and woven irrelevantly into one long serpentining sentence
+which extends to the point where the shore goes round a corner; and
+from there, when you reach that point, continues to the next. It is
+made of shells, derelict trees, bushes which have drifted from shores
+only a botanist could guess, boards and fragments of wrecks, yarn and
+rope, bottles, feathers, carapaces of crabs and sea-urchins, and corks,
+all tangled with pulse into an interminable cable. Sometimes it runs
+through the black ribs of an old wreck.
+
+Perhaps, after the seaweed, there are more corks in its composition
+than anything else. The abundance of corks on this desert shore, for
+they are to be found at the head of every miniature combe of the
+sandhills, most of them old and bleached, but some so fresh that it
+is easy to read the impress of the vintners on their seals, suggests
+that man’s most marked characteristic is thirst. If one went by the
+evidence on this beach, then thirst is the chief human attribute.
+In this life we might be occupied most of the time in drinking from
+bottles. Examples of the bottles are here, too. The archæologists of
+the future will find our enduring bottles and corks in association,
+and they will discover, by experiment, that the corks often fit the
+bottles, and they will deduce that both were used, in all probability,
+in conjunction. But for what reason? Nothing will have been left in
+the bottles for the archæologists but dirt. We occasionally look on
+to-day while a learned man, from fragmentary evidence, creates a
+surprising picture of the past. I feel I should enjoy coming back,
+several thousand years hence, to hear another learned creature, a table
+before him covered with the shards and corks of our years--one almost
+perfect example has the mysterious word BOLS cast on it--explain to his
+fascinated audience what he feels sure, from the relics before him, on
+which he has spent the best years of his life, the mysterious folk of
+our own age were like.
+
+We can be fairly sure not much evidence of our own age will remain by
+then. What will survive us will be the oddest assortment of rubbish;
+but the pertinacious corks will be there. The British Museum will
+have gone. It will be impossible to refer to the London Directory. No
+Burke will exist. All the files of our newspapers, with their lists of
+honours, will have perished. What will our age be called? Not the Age
+of Invention, of the Great War, of Reconstruction, or anything else
+that is noble and inspiriting; for not a vestige of a democratic press,
+an aeroplane, a motor-car, or a wireless set will remain. There will
+be only corks and bottles.
+
+“For the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....”
+Yet it does seem unfair that of all the proud memories of these
+resounding days, nothing may persist but our corks and bottles. Another
+interruption of ice may creep down from the Pole, as has happened
+before; as indeed happened once to the undoing of a previous race of
+men. Its rigours increase, but so gradually that men are hardly aware
+that anything is happening. They say to each other at last, “The
+summers seem very short.” The cheerful Press of that day, true to
+its function of maintaining the spirit of the people, never mentions
+Winter, never speaks of the cold, but always turns its pages to the
+south, where most of the sun is.
+
+Nevertheless that does not thaw the ice. It still creeps south. The
+habit of a week-end at a cottage is presently forgotten. Unalienable
+rights and privileges become buried under inexorable glaciers that know
+nothing of our sounder economic arguments. And, in the end, maybe the
+ball of St. Paul’s is dropped as an erratic block from the bottom of an
+iceberg to form a fossil in the ooze of a southern sea, to puzzle we
+may not guess what earnest investigator living in an ameliorated clime
+and time.
+
+That ice retreats again, and the haunts and works of our age are
+exposed, as were those of Magdalenian man. And what have we been
+able to guess about him? Very little; but he did, we are sure, use
+implements having enduring parts of flint and bone. It is fairly
+certain that if he were aware that we judged him by his flints, he
+would be a little grieved. And it would be too bad if the trifles,
+which our butlers discarded with a flourish during our dinners were all
+that survived for the future to see of us. Why, that archaeologist of a
+time to come may not even deduce that we employed butlers.
+
+
+VI
+
+The rain had ceased, but the quay of Burra offered no other benefit.
+I was down there before dawn. Morning had not come, but I suppose
+the downpour had washed some of the dark out of the night, for all
+the quay was plain. It was not the quay I knew, but its wan spirit;
+and the vessels moored to it were ghosts, the faint impress of dead
+ships on a world that now just retained a memory of them. There was no
+sound. There were only phantoms in a pallor. Perhaps it had ceased
+to rain because rain would be too substantial for a bodyless world.
+The irregular pools on the quay were not water, but descents to the
+profound. Rain would at once enlarge them till the quay dissolved
+and became as the Estuary, and as the sky, for both sea and sky were
+nothing. They were the depth of the future, in which were hints of what
+some day might see the sun.
+
+I felt I ought not to be there. There was no telling whether I was too
+soon or too late, whether I was the first man, or the last. I doubted
+that hush, and that dim appearance about me. When the air did stir, it
+was as if it were the breath of death, and the earth were the body of
+death. Then I made up my mind. It was no use going to sea, as I had
+intended. I would go back to bed. At that moment there were footsteps,
+and the quay at once became solid. Two black figures approached, the
+size of men. One of them put his foot into a great hole in the quay,
+and he did not vanish instantly, but made a splash and an exclamation.
+That voice certainly was something I knew. The other man laughed
+quietly, the familiar satiric comment which comes of resignation to
+fate. We were all going to sea, as far as the Foreland.
+
+That cape is the western horn to the bay, and nobody goes there,
+except sailors who die because they see the loom of it, or hear its
+warning, too late. The Foreland to the people of Burra is like the
+clouds. It is part of their own place, but it is unapproachable. At
+times it is missing. In some winds it will evaporate; though usually
+at sunset it shapes again, high, black, and fantastic, the end of
+the land to the west, and as distant and sombre as the world of the
+sagas. Is it likely, then, that one would ever think of a voyage to
+it? That cape, which one sees either because the light is at the right
+incidence, or because one is dreaming, might be no more than a thought
+turned backward to vague antiquity; to Ultima Thule, where the sun
+never rises now, but where it is always evening twilight. It would
+have no trees. It would be a desolation of granitic crags, mossed and
+lichened, and the seas below would be sounding doom, knowing that even
+the old gods were dead. It was not likely that we could credit such
+a voyage; yet the truth is we had assembled for it, and because of a
+promise made carelessly with an ancient mariner in a tavern on the
+previous afternoon. What, on such a morning, and in such a place, was
+such a promise? As intangible as was our quay when I first saw it that
+morning, and no more matter than the Foreland itself, which is always
+distant, and then is gone.
+
+Yet here we were. We had met before dawn, for that very voyage, because
+of an indifferent word spoken yesterday. The bar, too, would have to be
+crossed. The bar! Besides, we were getting most unreasonably hungry,
+and so could not smoke; and this induced the early morning temper,
+which is vile, and would be worse than the early morning courage but
+for the fact that that sort of courage is unknown in man, never rising
+to more than a bleak and miserable fortitude.
+
+Charon hailed us from below the quay. He had with him a nondescript
+attendant. We embarked for his craft, which he said was anchored in
+midstream. We recognised him as our sailor of yesterday, though now
+there was something glum and ominous about him. He had no other word
+for us, but rowed steadily, and looked down his beard. His bark was
+like himself, when, still in resignation to what we had asked for, we
+boarded her. She was flush-decked, her freeboard was about eighteen
+inches, she had no bulwarks--to tell the truth, she was but a very
+barge, with that look of stricken poverty which is the sure mark of
+the usefulness of the merely industrious. She would float, I guessed,
+if not kept too long in seas that washed her imperfect hatch-covers.
+She would sail her distance, if the wind did not force her over till
+the water reached the rent in her deck. She could carry thirty tons of
+stone; and, in fair weather, with reckless men, thirty-five tons. She
+had a freeboard, I repeat, of one foot six inches, now she was light,
+and peering through the interstices of her hatch-boards I could see her
+kelson, and note that though she did not leak like a basket she was
+doing her best. We were going to the Foreland to gather stones for the
+ballast of ships. Absurd and desperate enterprise! We could hear faint
+moaning, when attentive. That was the voice of the bar, three miles
+away.
+
+The skipper and his man hoisted the mainsail, and we three manned the
+windlass, working in link by link a cable without end, till we were
+automata going up and down indifferent to both this life and the life
+to come. The barge gave a little leap as the anchor cleared.
+
+The foresail was set. We drifted sideways round the hill. The silent
+houses, with white faces, looked at us one by one. We found a little
+wind, and the barge walked off past the lighthouse, which still was
+winking at us. There came a weighty gust; the gear shook and banged,
+but held taut. Off she went.
+
+Burra was behind us. Before us was a morose grey void. The bay
+apparently was only space, uncreated, unlighted; though in the
+neighbourhood of our barge we noticed there was the beginning of form
+in that dim and neutral world. Long leaden mounds of water out of
+nowhere moved inwards past us, slow and heavy, lifting the barge and
+dropping her into hollows where her sails shook, and spilled their
+draught. We three grasped stays, and peered outwards into the icy
+vacancy, wondering whether this was the free life, whether we were
+enjoying it, whether we wanted to go to the Foreland, and how long this
+would last. In the east there formed a low stratum of gold. Some of the
+leaden mounds were now burnished, or they glinted with precious ore.
+When the light broadened the air seemed to grow colder, as though day
+had sharpened the arrows of the wind.
+
+The hollow murmur from the bar increased to an intermittent plunging
+roar, and presently we fell into that noise. The smother stood the
+barge up, and stood her down, and drenched the mainsail to the peak.
+But it was only in play. We were worth nothing worse. We were allowed
+to go by, and one of us pumped the wash out of her, for the play had
+been somewhat rough.
+
+In the long swell of the bay our movements became rhythmic, and we
+settled down quietly in a long reach. A vault of blue had shaped
+over us. The Foreland was born into the world. It looked towards the
+new day, and was of amber; but over the moors to the north-east the
+rain-clouds, a gathering of sullen battalions, challenged the dawn
+with an entrenched region of gloom. Yet when the sun arose and looked
+straight at them, they went. It was a good morning. Now we could see
+all the bay, coloured and defined in every hanging field, steep, and
+combe. The waters danced. The head of the skipper appeared at the
+scuttle--only one at a time could get into our cabin--and he had a
+large communal basin of tea, and a loaf speared on a long knife.
+
+The Foreland, to which for hours our work seemed to bring us no nearer,
+which had been mocking the efforts to approach it of an obstinate
+little ship with a crew too stupid to realise that efforts to reach
+an enchanted coast were futile, suddenly relented. It grew higher
+and tangible. At last we felt that it was drawing us, rather too
+intimately, towards its overshadowing eminence. The nearer it got, the
+greater grew my surprise that in a time long past man had found the
+heart to put off in a galley, to leave what he knew, and to stand in to
+an unknown shore, if it offered no more than our cape. The apparition
+of the Foreland was as chill as the shadow in the soul of man. It
+appeared to have some affinity with that shadow. Though monstrous and
+towering, it seemed buoyant and without gravity, an image of original
+and sombre doubt. Above our mast, when I looked up, earthquakes and
+landslides were impending, arrested in collapse. But I thought they
+were quivering, as though the arrest were momentary. That vast mass
+seemed based on rumblings, shouts, and hollow shadows. Our craft still
+moved in, projected forward on vehement billows, past black jags in
+blusters of foam, and then anchored with calamity suspended above. Our
+ship heaved and fell on submarine displacements. The skipper and his
+man went below.
+
+When they reappeared they were naked. It was a good and even necessary
+hint. We got into the boat, and pulled towards a beach which was a
+narrow shelf at the base of a drenched wall. The rocks which flanked
+that little beach were festooned with weeds, and sea growths hung
+like curtains before the night of caves. Somehow there the water was
+stilled, and all but one of us leaped into it. One man remained in the
+boat.
+
+The ocean was exploding on steeples and tables of rock. It formed domes
+green and shining over submerged crags. The midday sun gave the foam
+the brilliance of an unearthly light. The shore looked timeless, but it
+smelt young. The sun was new in heaven.
+
+And what were those ivory figures leaping and shouting in the surf?
+As I watched them in that light a doubt shook me. I began to wonder
+whether I knew that little ship, and those laughing figures, and that
+sea. Who were they? Where was it? When was it?
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s note
+
+
+Hyphenation was standardized where appropriate.
+
+Spelling has been retained as originally published except for the
+changes below:
+
+  Page 63: “recruitment of orang-utans”    “recruitment of orangutans”
+  Page 91: “draws its toils tighter”       “draws its coils tighter”
+  Page 162: “whose volatile enthusiams”    “whose volatile enthusiasms”
+  Page 243: “space, uncreate, unlighted”   “space, uncreated, unlighted”
+  Page 245: “hung like curtains befor”     “hung like curtains before”
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75826 ***