Part 21 (1/2)
”Yes,” he said, ”Crete.”
He came nearer to me. ”That, sir,” he said with a challenging emphasis, ”is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most wonderful.”
”Five thousand years ago,” he remarked after a pause that seemed to me to be calculated, ”they were building palaces there, better than the best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing, too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.
Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.
And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's a tired sea....”
That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a year or so younger than myself, going, he said, ”to look at Egypt.”
”In our country,” he explained, ”we're apt to forget all these worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--there's always been Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.
It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart out of you....”
It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pa.s.s away northward and I listened to his talk.
”I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the skysc.r.a.pers,” he said, ”and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's just the next ruin,' I thought.”
I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is indistinct.
We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than the countless beginnings that have gone before.
”There's Science,” said I a little doubtfully.
”At Cnossus there they had Daedalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Daedalus!
He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't steel they had bra.s.s. We're too conceited about our little modern things.”
-- 9
I found something very striking and dramatic in the pa.s.sage from Europe to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the s.h.i.+p; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient destination; one is manifestly pa.s.sing across a barrier,--the ca.n.a.l has changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism, noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the sh.o.r.e is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the white clothes appear. Everyone casts off Europe, a.s.sumes an Asiatic livery. The very sun, rus.h.i.+ng up angrily and abruptly after a heated night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.
And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanis.h.i.+ng together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose t.i.tan ring the engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the s.h.i.+p day by day, and eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is the voyage from Europe to India still.
I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais, by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....
To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from something slight and ”advanced” to something ma.s.sive and portentous. I felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to justify my feelings....
And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable pa.s.sion of loneliness. A wound may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding, was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very cruel to me that I could not write to her.
Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during the inactivities of voyages and in large empty s.p.a.ces and at night when I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND
-- 1
I do not think I could now arrange into a consecutive history my travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its innumerable sources, to a c.h.i.n.k here, to a glowing reflection there, to a leap of burning light from some long inert darkness close at hand. But steadily the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world, little son, is the world of a limited cla.s.s in a small island, began to take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed at first chaotic, a drift and tangle of pa.s.sions, traditions, foolish ideas, blundering hostilities, careless tolerances, became confusedly systematic, showed something persistent and generalized at work among its mult.i.tudinous perplexity.
I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly the main generalizations that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and sounds and--smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive olfactory palette as much as its palette of colors--that rained daily and nightly upon my mind.