They have put a stout awning over the quarter-deck and strung a lot of electric globes there so that when the music is going and the illumination is turned on, the place is gay and pretty and cosey, and those of us who have not danced for twenty years of more begin to sit up straighter when the music starts, and presently we forget that all is vanity and life a sorry mess at best, and look about for a partner, and there on the wide, lifting, falling quarter-deck caper away the years. It is not so much wonder, then, that the prospect of land does not arouse any feverish interest. We are willing to go right on sailing for a while and not bother about land at all.
VI
A LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
It was a mistake, however, to be indifferent to Madeira. We are no longer so. Whatever enthusiasm we lacked beforehand we have acquired now. Of all fair, jewelled islands of the sea, it is the particular gem. Not one of us on this ship but has made up his mind to go to Madeira again some day, and to stay there and live happy ever after; or, if not during life, to try to exchange a corner of heaven for it when he dies.
We knew nothing about Madeira except what the little prospectus told us, and the day before arrival we began to look up guide-book information on the subject. There was not much of this on the ship; I suspect that there is not much anywhere. Madeira was known to the Phœnicians, of course, that race of people who knew everything, went everywhere, built all the first cities, invented all the arts, named everything, and then perished. I ought to be sorry that they perished, I suppose, but I'm not. I've heard enough of that tribe on this ship.
The Patriarch is stuffed full of Phœnician statistics, and to touch any line of historical discussion in his hearing is like tripping over a cord attached to a spring gun. He is as fatal as an Irishman I once knew who was perfectly adorable until some question of race came up. Then it was time to stand from under. According to Malone there was originally but one race—the Irish. All the early saints were Irish; so was Abraham; so was Noah; so was Adam; so was—but that is far enough back. I remember hearing him tell one night how, in a later day, when Alexander the Great set out to conquer Asia, he first sent emissaries to make peace with Ireland as a precaution against being attacked in the rear.
But I am beginning to wander. There is no trace of the Phœnicians, I believe, on Madeira to-day, and the early history of the island is mainly mythical. When ancient Mediterranean sailors went exploring a little into the Atlantic and saw its purple form rise on the horizon they decided that it must be the mouth of hell, or at all events the abode of evil creatures, and hastily turned back. One account says that in the course of time a gentleman named Taxicab—probably the inventor of the vehicle later known by that name—and his companion were shipwrecked on Madeira and set up a monument in celebration of the event. I don't know what became of Taxicab and his friend or the monument, but about the same time it was discovered again by a Portuguese named Zargo, who set it afire as a means of clearing the land of its splendid forests and kept the fires going for seven years.[1]
Zargo's devastation began about five hundred years ago, and the island has required all those centuries for recovery. It may be added that he believed Madeira to be the lost Atlantis, though a point of land thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide could hardly be more than a splinter of that vanished continent. More likely Madeira and the fragmentary islets about it formed that mythical Ultima Thule referred to by Ulysses, when, according to Tennyson, he said: