On

by Hilaire Belloc

I have always made it a rule in all my travels not to speak to any one in command, though it is a rule I have found it very difficult to keep. The reason of this rule is that if you speak to any human being you may agree with him or you may quarrel with him. Now, quarrelling with an equal is entertaining or fatiguing according to one's mood, but quarrelling with one in command is always disastrous unless one has great ambition. Therefore, I did not ask the Captain why he did this thing; but I sat there on the little iron bridge and myself lit a pipe, and indulged in that infantile trick for disappointing fate, which is to imagine things worse than they are.

I said to myself: "We will probably remain anchored here for a day, or perhaps for two days, but within the week I shall see Christian land." And I wondered whether the food in my bag (which was bread and a little cold pork and a bottle of wine) would last out, or whether I should have to depend upon their food, and, if so, what their food was like.

So we lay under the hot sun, rising and falling with the enormous rolls, now in the trough and now on the crest, as regular as the swing of the great silver lamp in front of the Tomb of St. James in Galicia, but on a much bigger scale of rise and fall.

There came out of the North a little point of light, which was foam upon the bows of a boat. She came nearer; in an hour one could make out what she was; another tiny steamer; and in another hour she was fairly close at hand. I said to myself: "This is what we are waiting for." But not at all: the little steamer passed us, the Captain at my side muttered her name; she was off to some Southern port: perhaps Mogador.

And so the hours went by. But at last, not too late in the afternoon, the true cause of our delay appeared. A boat set out from the harbour upon the ebb, rode over the great swell with ease and dexterity; just caught the moment to toss on board of us, as the sea lifted it, a gentleman extremely well dressed, lean, courteous, and silent. He had preferred to take a comfortable luncheon on shore: had I known that such a thing was possible I would have done so too. His appearance was, for some reason, the signal.

The moment he got on board the ship woke up again, the anchor chain rattled, and she began her way. She made five knots but not seven (at least, that was my guess), and so all day long we wallowed, past Africa, and I saw upon my beam a little pirate town and after that a great mountain. At sunset there opened before me for the first time in my life the Gates of Hercules, and marvellous they were to see thus from the West under the reddening light. They were very far away, the narrowest part of the Straits one could barely see, tiny points upon the horizon, and the Rock of Gibraltar one could not see at all, either because it was too far away or because it was hidden round a point of land.

There are sights which if one sees them for the first time in boyhood, when one can still feel, are like memories of Heaven; great revelations which build up the mind for the rest of one's life. These sights seen in the decline of life still stir one, though there is a mournful contrast between their power now and their power then. I had not thought that any novel sight could move me as this, my first sight of the Straits, moved me in the fall of that glaring African day.

"Here," said I to myself, "is the entry to the antique world. This is the place out of which the first galleys came and knew the tide. Perhaps through this also (who knows?) long ships from Atlantis once hauled in with oars bringing arts and letters to those from whom we spring." Through these Straits at this hour was running that convergence of European life which is their modern mark. There were six steamers in sight and the light of others appeared as the darkness fell. After the emptiness of the Atlantic I felt as though the Straits of Gibraltar were a highway, and I amused myself during all the first hours of the night in calculating the courses of the ships by the red and the green lights and their eclipse.

There was no moon; the stars came out in the warm air, very brilliant and single, and we were nearly nose on for the pointers of the Bear.