Under the Big Dipper

by Desiderius George Dery

Count Rondell was the least regular attendant at the Captain’s board. The latter explained that the Count’s health was not good. Dr. Brown had so reported to him.

Thus the days of heat and monotony stretched their weary lengths. They passed the harbor of Dshidda with its many picturesque boats, from little catamarans to large clumsy steamers. On the southern horizon disappeared also the rocks of Yanbu Bar, Sudan, Suakim and Loheia. On the fifth day after Morton had boarded the liner, when the sea once more showed the fiery red of sunset, they reached the head of the Gulf of Suez and the ship slid carefully into the basin which marks the southern terminal of the great Canal.

From Suez town the lights shot their sporadic blinking; the great tangle of boats of all descriptions and sizes tied up in the basin and adjoining docks began to show their mast lights and port lamps; the lighthouse on the narrow tongue of land stretching into the shadowy bay sent out its rhythmic signal flashes.

Morton, sitting opposite Count Rondell, gratefully leaned back in his flattened steamer chair and remarked: “What a relief to be so far north and at last on the eve of leaving this insufferable quarter of the world! I am glad to see a town once more, glad to see lights and real streets and hear real human noises even if they are as hideous as these are. It is good to look up to the heavens of our own familiar constellations and find our polar star promising the arrival home. See, Count, there, for the first time, can be distinguished all the stars of the Big Dipper! The Southern Cross is glorious, and I have admired it during many soundless nights in the desert; but give me our own starry sky, our own air, my own people!”

Count Rondell looked up with a smile. “To tell you the truth, my dear sir, I have traveled along latitudes I never expected to see and I barely noticed the Southern Cross. I certainly must be getting old and unobservant. But I can appreciate how you feel when you think of the loved ones who are waiting for you in your distant country, and to know that your coming home means so much happiness to them. I also am glad to see again the stars of the north—my stars—though I am returning with a heavy heart.

“I cannot help thinking,” added the Count, “of the part this waterway has played in the history of the world’s civilization. I see it as the highway of the trend westward of our humanity’s progress. You will recall, Mr. Morton, that in the dawn of civilization the traders of Egypt brought their spices and gold and ivory from India. They resigned their profitable trading to the shrewder Phoenician sailors who were followed by those of Syracuse and Carthage. Then came in the Middle Ages the merchant princes of the Venetian, Pisan and Genoese republics.

“It was a marine from this lost city who, with the aid of Spanish gold, discovered your own country when the trade of the then known world had already drifted into the hands of the enterprising people of the Hisparian peninsula. We know what the aggrieved Portuguese and the stolid Dutch contributed to this westward march; but then had to yield, in their lives, to the superior gifts and stronger physique of the English race.

“Always it has been the cry of the ‘Westward Ho!’ And it always will be so. It would seem as if man could not resist following the path of the sun. Your people, Mr. Morton, your country will now step into the heritage of the world’s commerce. I am sure of it. It is the will of destiny.”

Morton looked at the speaker with a feeling of awe. The thought so clearly developed was entirely new to him, and he had no answer to make.

A bond of mutual sympathy had grown up between the two men, so divergent in their aims and ambitions, so far apart in their ages. The younger admired the poise, the gentle courtesy and faultless manner of the elder. He admired his freedom from prejudice, his absolute toleration of the failings and frailties of others, and his prompt, unqualified condemnation of everything wrong, cowardly and selfish.