For what are the significant things in travel? Let travelers candidly own up. He is a wise traveler who has few doubts about that, and such a man would be silent, of course, being wise. Who would believe him if he spoke? There was, for example, the French mail steamer close to us at Port Said, homeward bound. Her saloon passengers, the ultimate Parisian reflection of the grandeur that was Rome, surveyed in aloof elegance and in static hauteur the barbaric coarseness of Port Said. But for a chance hint I would most certainly have saluted, as is the Anglo-Saxon habit, the refinement and pride of the folk on the Frenchman’s promenade deck as the very luster—which is so hard to attain—of Western civilization’s most exquisite stuff. But my glance drew away to the Frenchman’s forward deck, and there I saw something which tumbled down my hitherto unquestioned convictions about those qualities which make, as we should put it, the right folk. That deck was loaded with passengers from Cambodia and Cochin China, people of quite another culture—or of no culture. They did not seem to be travelers by deliberation or decision, like ourselves. It was easy to guess they had merely obeyed, like little children, the stern directing finger of fate. They showed no curiosity in us, or in Port Said. They were as still, and as watchful or as indifferent, as delightful images. They stayed where they had been placed. Yet if the French ladies were beautiful, then what shall we say of those little figures? By what means, by what habitual, tranquil, and happy thoughts, did they attain without wish or effort to a countenance which made the refinement and haughty demeanor of the first-class passengers above them identical with the barbaric challenge and insolence of Port Said? It did not surprise me that for our exhibition of Western enterprise and energy those children of another clime had but shy and mild astonishment. One of them, who might have been an attractive piece of craftsmanship in ivory and ebony, did give to the busy and heated scene the faintest of smiles. A doubt as to what made him smile blurred for me later the enduring testimony to Western skill and activity in the Suez Canal, and even the still more remarkable evidence of our energy at Kantara, a wilderness of abandoned railways and earthworks, with square miles of abandoned airdromes and rusting and sand-blown wreckage, where Anglo-Saxon genius for scientific organization, and British wealth, had built the camp and engines for the last conquest of the Holy Land. It is most disquieting to get a hint that the established way of life of one’s kin may be foolish after all, and that there are other ways.
Why should a Cambodian smile have so haunted me that my hope and endurance in travel were not rewarded with the satisfaction I had a right to expect, when witnessing the marvels in foreign lands created there by the superior culture of my dominant race? Did I go to sea for that? Nothing like it. And next morning, when I looked out from my cabin port, there still was the mere canal. Beyond it was the desert, and over that gray and vacant plain was an announcement of the coming sun. The sky was empty, like the desert. Nothing unusual was expected, evidently. But it was only with the first half-awakened glance that I guessed it was the common sun which was to come. In another instant I was aware that that hushed and obscure land was humbly awaiting its lord. The majestic presence suddenly blazed, and ascended to overlook his dominion. A terrifying spectacle! It would have frightened even a poet in the mood to hail the beneficence of one of man’s earliest gods. The glances of that celestial incandescence were as direct as white blades.
In the south, to which we were headed, a high range of Africa’s stark limestone crags stood over a burnished sea. The sun looked straight at them. And just above them, parted from their yellow metallic sheen by a narrow band of sky, was the full globe of the declining moon; and the moon herself was no more distant and no more spectral than earth’s bright rocks beneath her. It was not surprising that that scene was motionless and constant. There was no wind, there was no air, or all would have vanished like a vision of what has departed. Those luminous bergs shone like copper. Their markings were as clear and fine as the far landscape of a newly risen harvest moon. Suez was not far away, and its lilac shadows were as unearthly as the desert. But there was substance alongside our ship. Some villas were immediately below, arbored in tamarisk and cassia. A few trees in that green mass were in crimson flower. I could smell the burning ashore of aromatic wood. A child in a cerise gown stood under a tree, but she was so still that, like the polished water, like the hills of brass and the city built of tinted shades, she might have been the deceit of an enchantment.
A tugboat rounded a point, shattered the glass of the sea, and the child, released from the spell, moved from under the tree. Men in our ship were shouting. Mail bags for Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, and other places as well defined were thrown aboard. Life began to circulate. These men gave no attention to dead hills and the tyrant in the heavens. I am prepared to believe they would have been incredulous concerning any town about there built of lilac shadows. Our ship rounded away into the Gulf of Suez, the northern corner of the Red Sea.
CHAPTER V
We are aware—though we hardly dare to whisper our knowledge—that even our street at home will, at rare times, give us the sensational idea that we really do not know it. Can it exist in a dimension beyond our common experience? We think we glimpse it occasionally on another plane. This sense, luckily, is but fleeting. We could not support a continued apprehension of a state of being so remarkable. We come down to our beans and bacon, and are even glad to answer the bell to that and the coffee. Well, it is more remarkable of the Gulf of Suez that it permits no certain return to common sense. The coast of Africa, and its Asian opposite, remained within a few miles of our ship all day, as pellucid as things in a vacuum, but as unapproachable as what is abstract and unworldly—the memory of a dead land, though as plain as the noonday sun. There can be no shores in other seas anything like the coast of that gulf. The panorama of heights silently opened and went astern, monotonous, brilliant, and fascinating. In all those long miles there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a cloud, not a habitation. The sky was silver, the sea was pewter, and the high bergs were of graven gold or bronze. The chart informed us of Moses’ well, and of Badiat Ettih, or the Wilderness of the Wanderings, and Mount Sinai. “Moses, sir,” said the bo’sun to me, “he had enough rock for his tablets, but that was a hot job he had getting them down.” But since those early days and tribulations the land has been left to mankind but as a reminder of things gone. Nobody to-day ever lands on those beaches, on those arid islands. How could they? That we could see the contortions of the exposed strata, and the dark stains thrown by the sun from yellow bowlders on immaculate sands, was nothing. We see, in the same way, the clear magnification of another planet through a glass, but that is as near as we can get to it. There were numerous small islands between us and the shore. They were always glowing satellites of bare ore, without surf, fixed in a sea of lava, and blanched by the direct and ceaseless blaze in the heavens. Unshielded by air and cloud from that fire, they perished long ago.
Our smoke rose straight over the ship’s funnel, then curled forward, showering grits. If the hand was placed carelessly on a piece of exposed metal work one knew it. Our bo’sun, who has no expression but a disapproving stare, who never sleeps, who has the frame of a gorilla, and whose long hairy arms, bowed inward and pendent as he walks the deck, are clearly made for balance and dreadful prehensility, admitted to me that it was “warm.” Yes. The sprightly fourth engineer appeared from below as I loafed along an alleyway which had the fierce radiation of a nether corridor, and he drooped on the engine-room grating with the air of a fainting girl; he did not call it warm, but that is what he meant.
Night came, and the cabin had to be faced. The hour was made as late as possible, but it came. Reading was not easy. It would not have been easy then for a young novelist to enjoy the press cuttings assuring him of those original features of his work which distinguished it from that of Thomas Hardy. But the cabin made it no easier to do nothing, for how can one lie sleepless in a bunk and merely look at time standing still because the thermometer has frightened it? Beside me was a book the skipper had lent to me, with a hearty commendation of its merits. “Facts,” he had said to me significantly, looking at me very hard. “Facts, my dear sir!”
So it looked. It looked like nothing but facts. Who wants them? What are they for? And the coarse red cover of the book betrayed its assurance in its uncontaminated usefulness. A copy of it will never be found in any boudoir. (This is probably the first reference to it by a critic.) I lifted the weighty thing, took another look at my watch—no hope!—summoned so much of my will as had not melted, and began.