One morning the lookout signaled land. It was a thin shadow over the port bow. There was no other cloud in the sky. That shadow grew in height, darkened, and closed in on us. Then the shadow of Africa approached our other beam. Toward evening we passed between the Pillars. We may have been no nearer to the Moluccas, but we had escaped from the darkness of the north. That was certain at sunset, when we might have sailed off the waters of earth and were elevated to a sea where there were no soundings, and logs would be profane. We were not alone there. A felucca was in the vacancy between us and the phantom of a high coast. Our own yellow masts were columns of light. The foam at the bows was flushed with hues never seen in water. And ahead of us, that sea we were to enter was the smooth expanse of an unknown and lustrous element. It was brighter than the sky. From the lower wall of a vault of saffron a purple veil dropped to the rim of a vast mirror. I do not know what was hidden by that veil. It was a dusky curtain circling the brightness and its folds rested on the mirror. Down on a hatch below me some of our fellows started a gramophone with a fox trot.
CHAPTER IV
We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in its first bloom, and the sea was its perfect reflection. It was easy to feel older than the sky and the sea, for our ship was solitary in the very waters where, out of the traffic in ideas and commodities between Knossos and Memphis, had grown the Athens of Pericles, and Rome and Paris, London and New York. If there is anything to be said of that awful thought, perhaps it would never do to say it here. It may be altogether too late in the day to brood with fond and kindling eye upon the cradle of that particular deep which rocked our childhood into the beginnings of Chicago and Manchester. Let us say nothing about it.
The next sunrise it was the skipper himself who called me. This was a genuinely surprising event. His white figure was even startling, for to me then he had become a senior master mariner in a service so august as our blue funnel, the house flag of which is, I suspect, east of Suez, more potent than the emblems of not a few proud states. The honor was unusual enough to cause me to strike my forehead against the opened port as I sat up respectfully. Our master has been at sea for forty years, so his appearance of weariness and of ironic understanding may mean that his experience of men has been extensive, or it may mean nothing. “We are entering Egypt,” was all he said, while his lean hands rested on the edge of the bunk; he then turned away as if he supposed this sort of thing would never end. But possibly he had been up all night.
A Group of Chinese Firemen
There was an apparition of a city over the sea ahead of us. It was so delicate that the primrose of sunrise, deepened in inclosed and quiet waters, might in that place have conspired to produce a mirage of one’s bright expectations. That was the gate to all that romantic folk with a meaning eager but scarcely articulate call the Orient. Yet which of us is not romantic when we see it for the first time? I watched that gate heighten and become material as our ship insensibly approached it, till I could read on the seaward brow of this entrance to romance the famous legends, “Topman’s Tea” and “Macgregor’s Whisky.” Port Said, you soon discover, is just like that.
If it is anything at all it is more West than East. A somber flotilla of barges manned by a multitude of dark fiends was waiting for us, and our ship hardly had way off her before she became Tophet with coal dust, unholy activity, and frightful jubilation. It is the privilege of civilized men to give their appetites and repulsions the sanction of reason with its logic, and therefore I did not accept Port Said because I did not like it. It is certainly not the Orient, and I hoped it was not even its gate. Its address and its manners are as abrupt and threatening as is the Stock Exchange to a timid stranger who has misadventured within its sacred precincts. I went ashore, but soon returned to the ship, for I fancied that our Chinamen might be closer to a simple heart than the oblique calculation of that port.