Sickness and a Masai raid befell us early in our adventure. The
porters suffered from the first, but in the raid all alike. An Arab
caravan-man was killed, four negroes were wounded, Sir Charles had a
flesh wound from a flung spear, and I a rifle-ball through the left
arm, breaking the bone. The Masai, finding us too strong, left as
suddenly as they had come. We made camp, buried the Arab, and stayed
to heal the sick and the hurt in a place out of a fairy-book, so
strange and beautiful it was. With my wound I had more than a touch
of fever. Ahasuerus and Maxwell nursed me and John Sydney set the
bone and helped me up and out. This was the end for me of illness.
I came out of it seasoned, and the rest of Africa gave me only
momentary hurts, though many an adventure when it seemed that death
or maiming was nigh.
We recovered the sick and moved on. By degrees the first novelty,
beautiful, with a dash of terror, passed. There set in routine
interest, routine toil.
We were not primarily an exploring expedition. Exploration of much
of the route taken had been done for us. But it fell to us to
lighten certain obscurities that overhung affluents of the two great
streams. Nor had our enterprise political color. Yet, where we
lived days or weeks with savage tribes, and some of these not at all
without glimmerings of things to be, we gave, I suppose, seed-ideas.
At one place, on high land, we met a tribe that was assuredly
lifting. It had a king who was, in his way, an Alfred. This man
learned more than one thing that would, in the long run, serve
him.... The expedition's official intent was to increase knowledge
of life in various forms, to read the rocks, make a great collection
of plants, draw and photograph wild, moving life, learn all we might
for zoölogy, anthropology, ethnology. We were to put down in black
and white observation, experience, deduction. We were to bring back
to Europe some valuable journal--journal made at last of journals,
half a dozen contributing.
Maxwell was no journalist. He deputed it to me, and I kept our
common record. But, besides this, I began, beyond Victoria Nyanza, a
record and comment of my own, written after my own fashion. In the
weeks that we waited where Congo enters Atlantic, and upon the
England-bound ship, I put this in order, and it became _Letters from
Africa_. The idea of the _African Dream_ came to me under Ruwenzori,
but I did not write it for three years.
At times this expedition tasted beauty and marvel to the height; at
times it wrestled with dangers, trials, and fears. At times it met
gross weariness, or stumbled in tunnels of anxiety with a feeling of
all Africa caving in upon it. Sickness visited us, and now and again
death.
Ere we were two months upon our way Philip Grantham died from some
poisonous thing.
We felt grief, we felt awe, he had been so bright, vigorous, like a
Greek boy. Sir Charles stood, sat, moved, with lips so pressed
together that there was but one dark line. We buried the shell out
of which was gone the young master. We raised a little cairn over
it, we stayed there by it two days and nights. We marched on, Sir
Charles very stern-looking, but himself, with a will to keep his
cloud of sorrow in his own sky.
That night we made camp in a sandy country, above a trickle of water,
with a sighing wind about us, blowing, twisting, the smoke from our
fire. The white men's tents were pitched together, the Arabs' lay a
little apart, the many negroes couched about a fire with their heads
almost in the embers. Each night two white men shared the watch.
One slept till the dark was half gone, when his fellow waked him and
himself slept. The trader Robinson and I parted this night between
us. He slept upon the sand, gleaming under a half-moon. I sat and
listened to the wind and all it talked about. The moon traveled
westward, the camp lay still. I thought that in one place I saw
something move, and I went softly that way, to find that it was a
dwarf tree stirring in the wind. Returning, as I passed Sir
Charles's tent I heard him groan.
I sat near the sleeping trader, and I looked toward Sir Charles, and
I wished--I willed--I tried to help him.
If indeed, and I believed it, we were members one of another, then he
was in me and I in him. And the "dead" youth, the invisible
youth--so visible to the mind's eye, so penetrated by the mind's
touch, so felt for and felt with, understood, warmed with liking,
recognized as hardly had he been before--what perversity to say that
he was wholly gone! He had not gone--he was here--in that sea
wherein all we bathed, in that organism where death and separateness
faded out.
I sat upon the sand, above the watercourse beneath the moon. I drew
myself together, concentering, until the spark came, until the
vibration changed, until there were long, swift light and warmth--no
forms, but fluidity, energy, radiance. I was aware that if I had
been strong enough to go farther, I might remake forms--make them
fairer, even, subtler, less destructible, greater. But I was not
strong enough--nothing like strong enough. I tried to direct the
waves of assurance, of comfort. I wished him in the dark tent to
feel them. I tried to soothe as I would have tried to soothe my own
hurt hand or arm, as I would have tried to comfort and recover
myself. He was myself, his hurt my hurt. That was the thing that I
believed with passion of all things. I tried to bring the living
youth alive in him. If there was _continuum_, if there was _plenum_,
we were all one. I tried to make the underneath flowing rise in him,
bring the strongest comfort. I did not go out to him; he was in
myself. I found him there; I tried to make the true blood flow in a
numbed part of myself--and that self was not just Michael Forth.
Michael Forth was but a fiber of that self. All the small "I's" of
earth were but surface colorations of that Identity.
The perception--the action--if action there were--could not be long
sustained. I had tried from a fourth dimension to engender light and
warmth in one who suffered. I did not know--I do not know--if there
was success--though I think that there was some success--filmy
enough, undoubtedly.... The inner sphere closed again from view.
The moon shone, the wind sighed, the water murmured. It was time to
wake the trader.
We looked upon Victoria Nyanza and headwaters of Nile. We lived for
a time beside a village in western Uganda, clean, with banana-groves,
inhabited by a Bahima folk, tall and handsome. We were plentifully
provided with objects of barter, and they brought us in return what
we needed. The country was most beautiful, high, and healthful.
Here were cattle and game in herds, and many a strange great
quadruped. The native chiefs and strong men, the women, the old men,
and the children showed themselves friendly. They came by the paths
that were everywhere, a faint reticulation over all the land, to our
camp, or we trod the same lines to the village. We sat under the
trees that they favored. Llewellyn and Ferraro more especially
throve here. Llewellyn had picture-books which he showed the Bahima;
he told them stories like an old Welsh bard. He had the gift of
discrimination. I would watch his bright eye dart and fix upon some
one member of the bronze circle. "There's one who can tell a story!
Come ye forth, friend, there, and unpack us tale or ballad!" Two out
of three times Llewellyn succeeded. The glories of the Bahima jetted
forth. Meantime the Welshman, in the shadow of some one's broad
shoulder, drew out pocket tablet and pencil and fell to transcribing.
He and Ferraro had great knowledge of peoples and types.
We had in Africa strenuous hours, and again hours unoccupied. In
some of the latter I put myself to school to Llewellyn and Ferraro.
I learned much from them. I heard corroborated that which I had
always guessed, the profound unity of the human family. And out of
the unity, that stem, that vine, but never detached from it, the
multitude of branches. Some were wildings and some garden and
orchard and vineyard glories--all in proportion, it seemed to me, as
they kept knowledge of the fire and sap of the whole. I learned much
of great drama from the Welshman and the Italian's lore--strange
tales of the divers leaves and buds, twigs and branches of the ash
Yggdrasil.
But it was with Mannheim, the naturalist, that I roamed farthest.
This man, twenty years my elder, son of a Jewish rabbi, born in
Hamburg, raised in London, had broken from cities into gardens, into
fields and lane sides, into forests. The king who knew alike the
cedar and the hyssop of the wall might have found somewhat of himself
in this mind. Mannheim had a tall, thin figure, soft, curled hair
upon head and chin, a hooked nose, eyes now keen and now deep, still,
and inward-looking. Sometimes for days I went with him, in and out
of Uganda forests. We took Ahasuerus with us and three or four
Bahima men. At times Mannheim talked about himself, his youth and
hard schooling and emerging purposes. "Each one finds what he
seeks," said Mannheim, "and each one seeks what he is able to find."
"Even if he seek the ultimate circle and the original fountain?"
"Even that. But he must give himself time. As you say, Rome was not
built in a day.... Certainly the new Jerusalem is not built in a
day."
We sat beneath an acacia and looked at lilies in an arm of
marsh-water. I repeated aloud:
"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear! oh, clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
"Who said that?"
"Blake."
We sat silent for a time. Then said Mannheim: "The next century is
to be the psychic century. _Fin de siècle_ they call this piece of
time; nineteen hundred will begin to listen to a still, small voice."
"You mean that the conscious subjective--and, correspondingly, the
objective--will widen its borders?"
"Yes. We shall begin to use nerve and muscle that have been forming."
"What are the first movements of the new child?"
"They have great variety. Naturally. At first the freedom seems
wholly interior."
"Old self is very gloomy and insists to larger self that it is
mistaken."
"Yes. All kinds of idle fears. Babes learning to walk--the chair
and mother's arms too far away!"
"Perseverance and courage?"
"Yes. It's worth all boldness."
I looked at the lilies by the reeds. They were very fair; they
trembled on the dark water; they seemed lit from beneath, sapphire,
exquisite. The reeds grew musical instruments and living green and
of a vivid grace. It was a flash of transfiguration. I knew these
at times. They came and went, rifts of heaven, which then closed. I
spoke. "All that you call psychical--double-strengthened memory,
imagination at white heat, intuition that is a long reasoning process
flashed together, response to all manner of stimuli that once were
not noticed--all that is by no means all of it. There is no rest
short of the conscious Totality!"
"I agree," said Mannheim. "All that we can now conceive, or that we
can conceive to-morrow, is conceived but to be lost in greater light.
All the same, take what we can now do, and let it bring forth what
wonder it will! It is first steps. After walking comes running;
after running, flying; after flying we may begin to look toward that
wide home which is omnipresence." He sat silent; then: "I recognized
you as one of the new children. There are more of these children now
than used to be. Presently there will be many--another race. Then
will the mass of things begin to change."
One of the men brought him a strange flower. Mannheim studied it,
touching, handling, with the naturalist's respect and understanding.
"I have not seen one like it," I said.
"No," he answered. "It has fellows, but they are rare. It is
emerging from a class. See, here and here, how it differs.... But
all that it is doing is simply using its powers."
"There's a thing," I said, "in Dante's _Purgatory_ that struck me
sharp and quick when I read it as a boy. There's a round of the
mountain where the souls lie prostrate with face pressed and eyes
blinded against rock and dust. They have lain there, each one, very
long. '_My soul hath cleaved unto the dust._'... One of them stirs,
rises upon hands, rises to knees, stands, and goes. The mountain
thrills and gives forth a cry of praise. Presently to Dante and
Virgil appears the shade risen from that rock like Christ from the
grave. They converse, and the soul--it is one Statius--tells them
that the mountain trembles and acclaims when any spirit among those
prostrate ones who have been covetous only of earth, of metal, and of
dust, and all the dream and cozenage of life
feels itself
So purified, that it may rise, or move
For rising....
Purification, by the will alone
Is proved, that free to change society
Seizes the soul rejoicing in her will....
Free wish for happier clime.
"So Statius. Then says Virgil:
"Now I see the net
That takes ye here; and how the toils are loosed."
"Yes," said Mannheim. "I hold that to be true through every order."
With the flower still in his hand we went back to camp. Two or three
days after this we were out at the foot of a fairly high mountain, in
a grove of bamboo. It was a grove of strange and rich suggestion;
fairy pillars, fairy arcades, smoothness, straightness, jewel-light
and fine, sere whispering. After a while we rested, lying on dry,
clean earth. Outside the bamboo the men with us sat under a
breadfruit-tree and played some game with bits of bone. We saw them
brokenly, glintingly, through the forest of bronze-green jointed
stalks.
Said the naturalist: "There's a kind of experimenting that must go on
all the time if we are to get anywhere. Laboratory work like any
other--patient trials and then patient trials again. If once in a
hundred times there comes fluorescence--results--we are glad and
praise the America beyond the foam.... You get into wide past and
wide present easily?"
"Yes."
"And you travel within, as one calls it? You say, 'I am in my
birthplace'--or, 'I am in New York'--or London--or maybe Canton or
Calcutta?"
"Yes."
"You use all your knowledge, sense of probabilities, associative
power, and so forth, and--sometimes palely, sometimes less
palely--comprehend, comprise, are things, situations, movements,
events, and trains of these?"
"Yes. I go many places within myself, and I do many things. But the
reality feeling is sometimes very weak."
"The reality will increase.... Let us experiment.... I have been in
America. I have been to your Niagara Falls. Have you been there?"
"Yes--long ago."
"Can you recall the cataract? The rush of the river down, the
thunder, and the upflung churned water--"
"Yes."
"Then recall it now with all the energy you can! I will do likewise.
See if we can meet and double the perception. Sometimes it is
possible. It is worth the trying."
The bamboo grove held us as in some magic grot, cool and dim,
stately, whispering. I shut my eyes and sat still, breathing
lightly. The inner man, into whose hands all places run, gave heed
to Niagara.
It was here, the roar and the intense, deep, swift, utter push of the
river over the brim! The ground trembled; I knew again the smell of
the mass, the chill, the thundering fall, the outflung enormous
spray. Niagara! Very well, it was here, and in a high degree of
reality. I had put my strength to bringing it here. There was the
sense, as always when a thing like this was done, of a widened brain,
of a changed breathing, of a lifted inner firmament. I held Niagara
in presence. But Mannheim? That needed another strength. I put
forth energy of recognition.... I felt him. For one instant the two
Niagaras roared together.... Immense sound, motion, light--all
significance doubled--sense of river where had been brooks, sense of
eagle where had been eaglets, sense of triumphing, outfilling life,
memory, knowledge--the subjective brain, the objective brain, great
planets where had been lesser ones--everywhere a changed dynamic....
The instant sank and passed. There fell diminution, paling,
slowing.... Here was only the single Niagara, and it seemed a wraith
beside what had been. It disappeared. Two men sat in Africa in a
grove of bamboo.
Said Mannheim: "That was a fleeting synthesis of two. Conceive, will
you, how it will be when we are all one!"