She ought, according to her merits, to hold pride of place here. But she was quiet and unobtrusive as she was faithful and affectionate, whereas Eclipse was nothing of the kind, only a noisy blusterer, thinking of no one but himself. Therefore, as happens so often with us, has he stolen a march on a failing memory for prior [75] ]recognition. But the ‘ox’ is grass, and Kálee still lives in the great Eastern Empire, and has two servants to wait upon her. O Dea certe!
‘Behold!’ said Treloar, as we lay and smoked in the moonlight, after supper, in front of our tent, which we had pitched between the door-posts of what had evidently been a building of some size, but of which they were the sole remains. ‘Behold, my friend, the end of it all! But a few years are passed, and where, now, are the busy thousands that toiled and strove and jostled each other, below there, in earth’s bowels, in the fierce race for gold? Look at it now! Think of the great waves of human hopes and disappointments and joys that have rolled to and fro across this miserable patch of earth! Think of the brave hearts that came hot with the excitement of the quest, and departed broken with the emptiness of it. Also, of those others, who never departed, but lie at rest beneath that yellow clay. Just a little while, in the new-born one, is centred alike the glow of success and the cold chill of failure; all the might of swift fierce endeavour, every passion, good and bad, that convulses our wretched souls. And then, after a brief season, its pristine form defaced and scarred, comes the rotting solitude of the tomb! Why ’tis, in some sort, the story of our corporal life and death!
‘“Over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Vale of Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,” the shade replied,
“For there lies El Dorado.”
[76]
]Behold, my friend, the Valley of the Shadow that has passed, wherein many a bold soul has gone down to Hades, “unhouselled, disappointed, unaneled.” Do their ghosts wander yet, I ask?’
‘O, bother!’ I mutter sleepily. ‘I’m tired. Let’s turn in.’
Fortunately such outbursts were rare. But when the fit came on, I knew too well the uselessness of attempting to stop it.
Awakened towards the small hours by the roarings of Eclipse, triumphantly apprising the world at large that his belly was full, I found the lantern still burning, and could see Treloar’s eye ‘in a fine phrenzy rolling,’ as he scribbled rapidly. Years afterwards I read in the Bombay Pioneer ‘How the Night Falls on Yamnibar,’ and thought it passable.