I
It was a coast-line hardly raised above the sea. On that low horizon
only a few rare palms silhouetted the far verge above the surf. The
pale-blue flood of the sea, lifting measurelessly on and on in
the shining levels of fair weather; the thin, white, uneasy line
wrinkling down the league-long spits of sand; the slender jets of the
tufted palms etching the vacant azure vague—there was nothing more,
hour after hour. And “in the afternoon we came unto a land”—but
that would be to anticipate. As a matter of fact, we did not come
to any land at all. We hove to, some three or four miles out in the
offing, and a few weather-wise boats bobbed about like corks on the
rollers, with many a careening sweep hither and thither. I climbed
down into one of them, and when I had recovered my balance found
myself and my luggage in the possession of a Berber boatman and his
“sailor-lad”; but this was an entirely new edition of the sailor
lad, bound in an earth-brown burnoose—an earnest-faced small boy,
with an unfathomable seriousness, and devout in every motion, like
a young acolyte, a fresh and unique incarnation of Cupid in bonds,
naïve, with a sweet smile, eyes _très douce_, and such a mastery of
his tasks in years still short of the glorious teens! What a hand he
had for a rope! and how he got about with his clothes! The other was
a life-worn man, _très triste_ in the face and in motion. Father and
son, and of the old race of the sea they were, a strange new type,
and with I know not what added of life sadness, of dour reality.
We were soon under way, a leaning boat on broad-bosomed waters,
and with that palm-set orange strip of sky to lead us on. I had
not enjoyed for years such a glorious sail. Under a crisp west
wind we rode the ridged waves with spurts of spray; the sun was
sinking in the splendid reach and magnificent arch of that world
of the void; and we drove through the purple-black sea furrows shot
with dying lights. The steamer was already melting with the horizon
behind. I seemed to have dropped out of the world, as if I had been
marooned. I was free of it; it had all lapsed away; it had gone
down. The stretch of the sea was immense. The bracing wind was as
heady as wine. “Fresh fields and pastures new,” I bethought
myself, looking to the low rim of land that hardly divided sea
from sky, and wondered if I should find fields of the yellow lotus
there. That margin was still distant, and I lay back in the stern
half dreaming, enjoying the wet tingle of the spray on my face, as
we made landward by long tacks, and the worn old man and the demure
boy with their eyes on wind and wave sat silent. The boat grated
against the pier. After a short walk I was in a small hotel, with a
few rooms round an inner court, a veranda overlooking it from above,
climbing roses, a pleasant French hostess, and no other guests.
It was the isle of Djerba. I had been drawn here because tradition
places on the island the home of the lotus-eaters, of whom Ulysses
long ago told a sea tale. This voyage was to be a hunting of
the lotus. I have had an appetite for it since boyhood. It is my
predestined food; but destiny has a remarkable way of escaping
me. I have observed the fact on several occasions. No “branches
of that enchanted stem” had met me on the pier, nor was there any
“mild-eyed, melancholy” person about, whom the most fatuous
could ever mistake for a strayed reveller. Things often turn out
in an unexpected way; but I had to admit there was an uncommon
disparity between my youthful vision of the lotus land and what I
saw. Where were the “three mountain-peaks,” and the slender,
high cascades of “downward smoke,” and the “gleaming river,”
to say nothing of its Eden background? There was not a mountain
anywhere in sight, not a hill, not a rise of ground. “A land of
streams”—there was not a brook, let alone a river, not a single
stream of any sort on the whole island, which had the appearance of
a flat mainland. From the housetop I looked on an Arab town of no
great extent, with a French core, scantily embowered with straggling
trees, and the view was unbroken, landward or seaward, the horizon
round. I suspect I shall find that mistily draped Tennysonian valley,
with its long-drawn scene, in the Pyrenees some day, near a castle
in Spain. It was not here. My French hostess had never heard of
the lotus.