I — Some Hints for Those About to Travel — Gifts of Fortune by H. M. Tomlinson

I Some Hints for Those About to Travel

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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