He thought two or three times of turning back, not from weariness, and certainly not from fear, except the fear that his father might wonder what had become of him. But, being a young Englishman, he did not choose to be beaten, and so he went on.
At last there reached his ears what seemed a dull, low murmur, but what was in fact the never-ceasing sound of a great river on its way to the sea; while at the same time—
"The scent of water far away
Upon the breeze was flung."
He hurried on, now over a grassy place, now through tall, thick reeds, until at last, emerging from a mass of them, he found himself on the edge of a steep precipitous bank, and lo! the Euphrates rolled beneath him.
He could have cried aloud in his surprise and disappointment. Was this indeed the great Euphrates—the grand, beautiful river he had come to see? Had this indeed flowed through Paradise?—this dull, muddy, most unlovely stream? Dark, dark it looked, as he stood and gazed down into its turbid waters. "Dark?" he said to himself, "no, it is not dark, it is black." And the longer he gazed the blacker and the drearier it grew.
Why stay any longer by "this ugly old stream"?—for so he called it. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. He turned to go back, and then the whole scene in its loneliness and desolation took a sudden grip of his young soul. The awe and wonder of the great, silent, solitary space overcame him. The river, instead of being a voice amidst the stillness, a living thing amidst the death around, was only another death. It seemed to flow from some—
"Waste land where no man comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world."
Then all at once, by a very common trick of fancy, young John Grayson found himself at home—at home really—in happy England. His mother, dead a year ago, was there still. He saw her room: the table with her books and work, and her favourite clock upon it; a shawl she used to wear of some blue, shimmering stuff like silk;—he saw her face. And then, as suddenly, all was gone. He knew that she was dead. And he stood alone with the silent sky, the desolate earth, the gloomy river—an atom of life in the midst of a vast, dead world. Before he knew it the tears were on his cheek.