conflagration. On all hands I began to see blazing structures soar, with
grand hurrahs, on high. In fives and tens, in twenties and thirties, all
between me and the remote limit of my vision, they leapt, they lingered
long, they fell. My spirit more and more felt, and danced--deeper
mysteries of sensation, sweeter thrills. I sipped exquisitely, I drew
out enjoyment leisurely. Anon, when some more expansive angel of flame
would arise from the Pit with steady aspiration, and linger with
outspread arms, and burst, I would lift a little from the chair, leaning
forward to clap, as at some famous acting; or I would call to them in
shouts of cheer, giving them the names of Woman. For now I seemed to see
nothing but some bellowing pandemonic universe through crimson glasses,
and the air was wildly hot, and my eye-balls like theirs that walk
staring in the inner midst of burning fiery furnaces, and my skin itched
with a fierce and prickly itch. Anon I touched the chords of the harp to
the air of Wagner's 'Walküren-ritt.'
Near three in the morning, I reached the climax of my guilty sweets. My
drunken eye-lids closed in a luxury of pleasure, and my lips lay
stretched in a smile that dribbled; a sensation of dear peace, of
almighty power, consoled me: for now the whole area which through
streaming tears I surveyed, mustering its ten thousand thunders, and
brawling beyond the stars the voice of its southward-rushing torment,
billowed to the horizon one grand Atlantic of smokeless and flushing
flame; and in it sported and washed themselves all the fiends of Hell,
with laughter, shouts, wild flights, and holiday; and I--first of my
race--had flashed a signal to the nearer planets....
* * * * *
* * * * *
Those words: 'signal to the nearer planets' I wrote nearly fourteen
months ago, some days after the destruction of London, I being then on
board the old _Boreal_, making for the coast of France: for the night
was dark, though calm, and I was afraid of running into some ship, yet
not sleepy, so I wrote to occupy my fingers, the ship lying still. The
book in which I wrote has been near me: but no impulse to write anything
has visited me, till now I continue; not, however, that I have very much
to put down.
I had no intention of wearing out my life in lighting fires every
morning to warm myself in the inhospitable island of Britain, and set
out to France with the view of seeking some palace in the Riviera,
Spain, or perhaps Algiers, there, for the present at least, to make my
home.
I started from Calais toward the end of April, taking my things along,
the first two days by train, and then determining that I was in no
hurry, and a petrol motor easier, took one, and maintained a generally
southern and somewhat eastern direction, ever-anew astonished at the
wildness of the forest vegetation which, within so short a space since
the disappearance of man, chokes this pleasant land, even before the
definite advent of summer.
After three weeks of very slow travelling--for though I know several
countries very well, France with her pavered villages, hilly character,
vines, forests, and primeval country-manner, is always new and charming
to me--after three weeks I came unexpectedly to a valley which had never
entered my head; and the moment that I saw it, I said: 'Here I will
live,' though I had no idea what it was, for the monastery which I saw
did not look at all like a monastery, according to my ideas: but when I
searched the map, I discovered that it must be La Chartreuse de
Vauclaire in Périgord.
It is my belief that this word 'Vauclaire' is nothing else than a
corruption of the Latin _Vallis Clara,_ or Bright Valley, for _l'_s and
_u'_s did interchange about in this way, I remember: _cheval_ becoming
_chevau(x)_ in the plural, like 'fool' and 'fou,' and the rest: which
proves the dear laziness of French people, for the 'l' was too much
trouble for them to sing, and when they came to _two_ 'l's' they quite
succumbed, shying that vault, or vo_u_te, and calling it some _y_. But
at any rate, this Vauclaire, or Valclear, was well named: for here, if
anywhere, is Paradise, and if anyone knew how and where to build and
brew liqueurs, it was those good old monks, who followed their Master
with _entrain_ in that Cana miracle, and in many other things, I fancy,
but aesthetically shirked to say to any mountain: 'Be thou removed.'
* * * * *
The general hue of the vale is a deep cerulean, resembling that blue of
the robes of Albertinelli's Madonnas; so, at least, it strikes the eye
on a clear forenoon of spring or summer. The monastery consists of an
oblong space, or garth, around three sides of which stand sixteen small
houses, with regular intervals between, all identical, the cells of the
fathers; between the oblong space and the cells come the cloisters, with
only one opening to the exterior; in the western part of the oblong is
a little square of earth under a large cypress-shade, within which, as
in a home of peace, it sleeps: and there, straight and slanting, stand
little plain black crosses over graves....
To the west of the quadrangle is the church, with the hostelry, and an
asphalted court with some trees and a fountain; and beyond, the
entrance-gate.
All this stands on a hill of gentle slope, green as grass; and it is
backed close against a steep mountain-side, of which the tree-trunks are
conjectural, for I never saw any, the trees resembling rather one
continuous leafy tree-top, run out high and far over the extent of the
mountain.
* * * * *
I was there four months, till something drove me away. I do not know
what had become of the fathers and brothers, for I only found five, four
of whom I took in two journeys in the motor beyond the church of Saint
Martial d'Artenset, and left them there; and the fifth remained three
weeks with me, for I would not disturb him in his prayer. He was a
bearded brother of forty years or thereabouts, who knelt in his cell
robed and hooded in all his phantom white: for in no way different from
whatever is most phantom, visionary and eerie must a procession of these
people have seemed by gloaming, or dark night This particular brother
knelt, I say, in his small chaste room, glaring upward at his Christ,
who hung long-armed in a little recess between the side of three narrow
bookshelves and a projection of the wall; and under the Christ a gilt
and blue Madonna; the books on the three shelves few, leaning different
ways. His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a
wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed: a bed all enclosed in
dark boards, a broad perpendicular board along the foot, reaching the
ceiling, a horizontal board at the side over which he got into bed,
another narrower one like it at the ceiling for fringe and curtain, and
another perpendicular one hiding the pillow, making the clean bed within
a very shady and cosy little den, on the wall of this den being another
smaller Christ and a little picture. On the perpendicular board at the
foot hung two white garments, and over a second chair at the bed-side
another: all very neat and holy. He was a large stern man, blond as
corn, but with some red, too, in his hairy beard; and appalling was the
significance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity of
those saffron cheeks. I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence for
this man; but I had it, certainly. Many of the others, it is clear, had
fled: but not he: and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross,
holding one real as the other--he alone among many. For Christianity was
an _élite_ religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing
from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within
their reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's,
it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.
It was my way to plant at the portal the big, carved chair from the
chancel on the hot days, and rest my soul, refusing to think of
anything, drowsing and smoking for hours. All down there in the plain
waved gardens of delicious fruit about the prolonged silver thread of
the river Isle, whose course winds loitering quite near the foot of the
monastery-slope. This slope dominates a tract of distance that is not
only vast, but looks immense, although the horizon is bounded by a
semicircle of low hills, rather too stiff and uniform for perfect
beauty; the interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed lands
which were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by
vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne,
orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all
embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the
village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played
there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or
foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river
divides, and takes the shape of a heart; and very far away are visible
the grey banks of the Gironde. On the semicircle of hills, when there
was little distance-mist, I saw the ruins of some seigneurial château,
for the seigneurs, too, knew where to build; and to my left, between a
clump of oaks and an avenue of poplars, the bell-tower of the
village--church of Saint Martial d'Artenset--a very ancient type of
tower, I believe, and common in France, rather ponderous, consisting of
a square mass with a smaller square mass stuck on, the latter having
large Gothic windows; and behind me the west face of the
monastery-church, over the door being the statue of Saint Bruno.
Well, one morning after four months, I opened my eyes in my cell to the
piercing consciousness that I had burned Monpont over-night: and so
overcome was I with regret for this poor inoffensive little place, that
for two days, hardly eating, I paced between the oak and walnut pews of
the nave, massive stalls they are, separated by grooved Corinthian
pilasters, wondering what was to become of me, and if I was not already
mad; and there are some little angels with extraordinarily human
Greuze-like faces, supporting the nerves of the apse, which, after a
time, every time I passed them, seemed conscious of me and my existence
there; and the wood-work which ornaments the length of the nave, and of
the choir also, elaborate with carved marguerites and roses, here and
there took in my eyes significant forms from certain points of view; and
there is a partition--for the nave is divided into two chapels, one for
the brothers and one for the fathers, I conclude--and in this partition
a massive door, which yet looks quite light and graceful, carved with
oak and acanthus leaves, and every time I passed through I had the
impression that the door was a sentient thing, subconscious of me; and
the delicate Italian-Renaissance brick vault which springs from the vast
nave seemed to look upon me with a gloomy knowledge of me, and of the
heart within me; and at about four in the afternoon of the second day,
after pacing the church for hours, I fell down at one of the two altars
near that carved door of the screen, praying God to have mercy upon my
soul; and in the very midst of my praying, I was up and away, the devil
in me, and I got into the motor, and did not come back to Vauclaire for
another month, and came leaving great tracts of burned desolation behind
me, towns and forests, Bordeaux burned, Lebourne burned, Bergerac
burned.
* * * * *
I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there I
experienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before my
Maker. And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of the
monastery-gate, something said to me: 'You will never be a good man, nor
permanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life,
devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exact
all your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modern
things, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand:
otherwise you are bound to succumb. Do this, therefore, beginning, not
to-morrow nor this afternoon, but now: for though no man will see your
work, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in His
way: and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan: and perhaps,
seeing, He may have mercy upon you.'
* * * * *
In this way arose the idea of the Palace--an idea, indeed, which had
entered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcome
of my raving moods: now, however, in a very different way, soberly, and
soon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations,
and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which,
one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, over-borne by
the vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessed
me. After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes: and I said: I
will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the
first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace
worthy the King of Earth.
* * * * *
After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a very
different man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble,
making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole,
drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and the
rule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at a
little over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weight
and bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the _sort_, deciding as to
the size and structure of the crane, forge, and work-shop, and the
necessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list of
over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure
from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole
earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.
* * * * *
I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn
streets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults,
etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris,
and then lying in the _Speranza_ at Dover; nor had I sufficient
familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the
aid of _Bottins_, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now
catalogued. My ship was the _Speranza_, which brought me from Havre, for
at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all
purposes, the _Speranza_ being an American yacht, very palatially
fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000
tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting
tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables me
to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting
air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons
only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days' work
at the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw out
her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on
the quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and the
half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to
Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of
dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London:
meaning to make Dover my _dépôt_, and the London rails my thoroughfare
from all parts of the country.
Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: a
harrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from
the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as
well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: for
the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down
sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake.
However, all's well that ends well, though if I had it to go through
again, certainly I should not. The _Speranza_ is now lying seven miles
off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th of
June at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and I
pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such
a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good
God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the
devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When the
thirty-three ...
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeen
years since--long years--seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to
what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of
the _Speranza_, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's
aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.
I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few
lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man
not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen,
seventeen ... ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I
have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if
the spelling of some of them is queer. My brain has been thinking
inarticulately perhaps, all these years: and the English words and
letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and
foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who
has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the
impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of
tackling them. Or perhaps it is only my fancy: for that I have fancies I
know.
But what to write? The history of those seventeen years could not be put
down, my good God: at least, it would take me seventeen more to do it.
If I were to detail the building of the palace alone, and how it killed
me nearly, and how I twice fled from it, and had to return, and became
its bounden slave, and dreamed of it, and grovelled before it, and
prayed, and raved, and rolled; and how I forgot to make provision on the
west side for the contraction and expansion of the gold in the colder
weather and the heats of summer, and had to break down nine months'
work, and how I cursed Thee, how I cursed Thee; and how the lake of wine
evaporated faster than the conduits replenished it, and the three
journeys which I had to take to Constantinople for shiploads of wine,
and my frothing despairs, till I had the thought of placing the
reservoir in the platform; and how I had then to break down the south
side of the platform to the very bottom, and of the month-long nightmare
of terror that I had lest the south side of the palace would undergo
subsidence; and how the petrol failed, and of the three-weeks' search
for petrol along the coast; and how, after list-rubbing all the jet, I
found that I had forgotten the necessary rouge for polishing; and how,
in the third year, I found the fluate, which I had for water-proofing
the pores of the platform-stone, nearly all leaked away in the
_Speranza's_ hold, and I had to get silicate of soda at Gallipoli; and
how, after two years' observation, I had to come to the conclusion that
the lake was leaking, and discovered that this Imbros sand was not
suitable for mixing with the skin of Portland cement which covered the
cement concrete, and had to substitute sheet-bitumen in three places;
and how I did all, all for the sake of God, thinking: 'I will work, and
be a good man, and cast Hell from me: and when I see it stand finished,
it will be an Altar and a Testimony to me, and I shall find peace, and
be well': and how I have been cheated--seventeen years, long years of my
life--for there is no God; and how my plasterers'-hair failed me, and I
had to use flock, hessian, scrym, wadding, wood-street paving-blocks,
and whatever I could find, for filling the interspaces between the
platform cross-walls; and of the espagnolette bolts, how a number of
them mysteriously disappeared, as if snatched to Hell by harpies, and I
had to make them; and how the crane-chain would not reach two of the
silver-panel castings when they were finished, and they were too heavy
for me to lift, and the wringing of the hands of my despair, and my
biting of the earth, and the transport of my fury; and how, for a whole
wild week, I searched in vain for the text-book which describes the
ambering process; and how, when all was nearly over, in the blasting
away of the forge and crane with dynamite, a long crack appeared down
the gold of the east platform-steps, and how I would not be consoled,
but mourned and mourned; and how, in spite of all my tribulations, it
was sweetly interesting to watch my power slowly grow from the first
feeble beginnings of the landing of materials and unloading them from
the motor, a hundred-weight at a time, till I could swing four tons--see
the solid metals flow--enjoy the gliding sounds of the handle,
crank-shaft, and system of levers, forcing inwards the mould-end, and
the upper and lower plungers, for pressing the material--build at ease
in a travelling-cage--and watch from my hut-door through sleepless
hours, under the electric moonlight of this land, the three piles of
gold stones, the silver panels, the two-foot squares of jet, and be
comforted; and how the putty-wash--but it is past, it is past: and not
to live over again that vulgar nightmare of means and ends have I taken
to this writing again--but to put down something else, if I dare.
Seventeen years, my good God, of that delusion! I could write down no
sort of explanation for all those groans and griefs, at which a
reasoning being would not shriek with laughter. I should have lived at
ease in some palace of the Middle-Orient, and burned my cities: but no,
I must be 'a good man'--vain thought. The words of a wild madman, that
preaching man in England who prophesied what happened, were with me,
where he says: 'the defeat of Man is _His_ defeat'; and I said to
myself: 'Well, the last man shall not be quite a fiend, just to spite
That Other.' And I worked and groaned, saying: 'I will be a good man,
and burn nothing, nor utter aught unseemly, nor debauch myself, but
choke back the blasphemies that Those Others shriek through my throat,
and build and build, with moils and groans.' And it was Vanity: though I
do love the house, too, I love it well, for it is my home on the waste
earth.
I had calculated to finish it in twelve years, and I should undoubtedly
have finished it in fourteen, instead of in sixteen and seven months,
but one day, when the south, north, and east platform-steps were already
finished--it was in the July of the third year, and near sunset--as I
left off work, instead of going to the tent where my dinner lay ready, I
walked down to the ship--most strangely--in a daft, mechanical sort of
way, without saying a word to myself, an evil-meaning smile of malice on
my lips; and at midnight I was lying off Mitylene, thirty miles to the
south, having bid, as I thought, a last farewell to all those toils. I
was going to burn Athens.
I did not, however: but kept on my way westward round Cape Matapan,
intending to destroy the forests and towns of Sicily, if I found there a
suitable motor for travelling, for I had not been at the pains to take
the motor on board at Imbros; otherwise I would ravage parts of southern
Italy. But when I came thereabouts, I was confronted with an awful
horror: for no southern Italy was there, and no Sicily was there, unless
a small new island, probably not five miles long, was Sicily; and
nothing else I saw, save the still-smoking crater of Stromboli. I
cruised northward, searching for land, and for a long time would not
believe the evidence of the instruments, thinking that they wilfully
misled me, or I stark mad. But no: no Italy was there, till I came to
the latitude of Naples, it, too, having disappeared, engulfed, engulfed,
all that stretch. From this monstrous thing I received so solemn a shock
and mood of awe, that the evil mind in me was quite chilled and quelled:
for it was, and is, my belief that a wide-spread re-arrangement of the
earth's surface is being purposed, and in all that drama, O my God, how
shall _I_ be found?
However, I went on my way, but more leisurely, not daring for a long
time to do anything, lest I might offend anyone; and, in this foolish
cowering mind, coasted all the western coast of Spain and France during
five weeks, in that prolonged intensity of calm weather which now
alternates with storms that transcend all thought, till I came again to
Calais: and there, for the first time, landed.
Here I would no longer contain myself, but burned; and that magnificent
stretch of forest that lay between Agincourt and Abbéville, covering
five square miles, I burned; and Abbéville I burned; and Amiens I
burned; and three forests between Amiens and Paris I burned; and Paris I
burned; burning and burning during four months, leaving behind me
smoking districts, a long tract of ravage, like some being of the Pit
that blights where pass his flaming wings.
* * * * *
This of city-burning has now become a habit with me more enchaining--and
infinitely more debased--than ever was opium to the smoker, or alcohol
to the drunkard. I count it among the prime necessaries of my life: it
is my brandy, my bacchanal, my secret sin. I have burned Calcutta,
Pekin, and San Francisco. In spite of the restraining influence of this
palace, I have burned and burned. I have burned two hundred cities and
countrysides. Like Leviathan disporting himself in the sea, so I have
rioted in this earth.
* * * * *
After an absence of six months, I returned to Imbros: for I was for
looking again upon the work which I had done, that I might mock myself
for all that unkingly grovelling: and when I saw it, standing there as I
had left it, frustrate and forlorn, and waiting its maker's hand, some
pity and instinct to build took me--for something of God was in Man--and
I fell upon my knees, and spread my arms to God, and was converted,
promising to finish the palace, with prayers that as I built so He
would build my soul, and save the last man from the enemy. And I set to
work that day to list-rub the last few dalles of the jet.
* * * * *
I did not leave Imbros after that during four years, except for
occasional brief trips to the coast--to Kilid-Bahr, Gallipoli, Lapsaki,
Gamos, Rodosto, Erdek, Erekli, or even once to Constantinople and
Scutari--if I happened to want anything, or if I was tired of work: but
without once doing the least harm to anything, but containing my
humours, and fearing my Maker. And full of peaceful charm were those
little cruises through this Levantic world, which, truly, is rather like
a light sketch in water-colours done by an angel than like the dun real
earth; and full of self-satisfaction and pious contentment would I
return to Imbros, approved of my conscience, for that I had surmounted
temptation, and lived tame and stainless.
I had set up the southern of the two closed-lotus pillars, and the
platform-top was already looking as lovely as heaven, with its alternate
two-foot squares of pellucid gold and pellucid jet, when I noticed one
morning that the _Speranza's_ bottom was really now too foul, and the
whim took me then and there to leave all, and clean her as far as I
could. I at once went on board, descended to the hold, took off my
sudeyrie, and began to shift the ballast over to starboard, so as to
tilt up her port bottom to the scraper. This was wearying labour, and
about noon I was sitting on a bag, resting in the almost darkness, when
something seemed to whisper to me these words: '_You dreamed last night
that there is an old Chinaman alive in Pekin._' Horridly I started: I
_had_ dreamed something of the sort, but, from the moment of waking,
till then, had forgotten it: and I leapt livid to my feet.
I cleaned no _Speranza_ that day, nor for four days did I anything, but
sat on the cabin-house and mused, my supporting palm among the hairy
draperies of my chin: for the thought of such a thing, if it could by
any possibility be true, was detestable as death to me, changing the
colour of the sun, and the whole aspect of the world: and anon, at the
outrage of that thing, my brow would flush with wrath, and my eyes
blaze: till, on the fourth afternoon, I said to myself: 'That old
Chinaman in Pekin is likely to get burned to death, I think, or blown to
the clouds!'
So, a second time, on the 4th March, the poor palace was left to build
itself. For, after a short trip to Gallipoli, where I got some young
lime-twigs in boxes of earth, and some preserved limes and ginger, I set
out for a long voyage to the East, passing through the Suez Canal, and
visiting Bombay, where I was three weeks, and then destroyed it.
* * * * *
I had the thought of going across Hindustan by engine, but did not like
to leave my ship, to which I was very attached, not sure of finding
anything so suitable and good at Calcutta; and, moreover, I was afraid
to abandon my petrol motor, which I had taken on board with the
air-windlass, since I was going to uncivilised land. I therefore coasted
down western Hindustan.
All that northern shore of the Arabian Sea has at the present time an
odour which it wafts far over the water, resembling odours of happy
vague dream-lands, sweet to smell in the early mornings as if the earth
were nothing but a perfume, and life an inhalation.
On that voyage, however, I had, from beginning to end, twenty-seven
fearful storms, or, if I count that one near the Carolines, then
twenty-eight. But I do not wish to write of these rages: they were too
inhuman: and how I came alive through them against all my wildest hope,
Someone, or Something, only knows.
I will write down here a thing: it is this, my God--something which I
have observed: a definite obstreperousness in the mood of the elements
now, when once roused, which grows, which grows continually. Tempests
have become very very far more wrathful, the sea more truculent and
unbounded in its insolence; when it thunders, it thunders with a venom
new to me, cracking as though it would split the firmament, and bawling
through the heaven of heavens, as if roaring to devour all things; in
Bombay once, and in China thrice, I was shaken by earthquakes, the
second and third marked by a certain extravagance of agitation, that
might turn a man grey. Why should this be, my God? I remember reading
very long ago that on the American prairies, which from time immemorial
had been swept by great storms, the storms gradually subsided when man
went to reside permanently there. If this be true, it would seem that
the mere presence of man had a certain subduing or mesmerising effect
upon the native turbulence of Nature, and his absence now may have
removed the curb. It is my belief that within fifty years from now the
huge forces of the earth will be let fully loose to tumble as they will;
and this planet will become one of the undisputed playgrounds of Hell,
and the theatre of commotions stupendous as those witnessed on the face
of Saturn.
* * * * *
The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with
thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty
griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth: and I,
poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. Upon
her I brood, and do not cease, but brood and brood--the habit, if I
remember right, first becoming fixed and fated during that long voyage
eastward: for what is in store for her God only knows, and I have seen
in my broodings long visions of her future, which, if a man should see
with the eye of flesh, he would spread the arms, and wheel and wheel
through the mazes of a hiccuping giggling frenzy, for the vision only is
the very verge of madness. If I might cease but for one hour that
perpetual brooding upon her! But I am her child, and my mind grows and
grows to her like the off-shoots of the banyan-tree, that take root
downward, and she sucks and draws it, as she draws my feet by
gravitation, and I cannot take wing from her: for she is greater than I,
and there is no escaping her; and at the last, I know, my soul will
dash itself to ruin, like erring sea-fowl upon pharos-lights, against
her wild and mighty bosom. Often a whole night through I lie open-eyed
in the dark, with bursting brain, thinking of that hollow Gulf of
Mexico, how identical in shape and size with the protuberance of Africa
just opposite, and how the protuberance of the Venezuelan and Brazilian
coast fits in with the in-curve of Africa: so that it is obvious to
me--it is quite _obvious_--that they once were one; and one night rushed
so far apart; and the wild Atlantic knew that thing, and ran gladly,
hasting in between: and how if eye of flesh had been there to see, and
ear to hear that cruel thundering, my God, my God--what horror! And if
now they meet again, so long apart ...but that way fury lies. Yet one
cannot help but think: I lie awake and think, for she fills my soul, and
absorbs it, with all her moods and ways. She has meanings, secrets,
plans. Strange, strange, for instance, that similarity between the
scheme of Europe and the scheme of Asia: each with three southern
peninsulas pointing south: Spain corresponding with Arabia, Italy with
India, the Morea and Greece, divided by the Gulf of Corinth,
corresponding with the Malay Peninsula and Annam, divided by the Gulf of
Siam; each with two northern peninsulas pointing south, Sweden and
Norway, and Korea and Kamschatka; each with two great islands similarly
placed, Britain and Ireland, and the Japanese Hondo and Yezo; the Old
World and the New has each a peninsula pointing north--Denmark and
Yucatan: a forefinger with long nail--and a thumb--pointing to the Pole.
What does she mean? What can she mean, O Ye that made her? Is she
herself a living being, with a will and a fate, as sailors said that
ships were living entities? And that thing that wheeled at the Pole,
wheels it still yonder, yonder, in its dark ecstasy? Strange that
volcanoes are all near the sea: I don't know why; I don't think that
anyone ever knew. This fact, in connection with submarine explosions,
used to be cited in support of the chemical theory of volcanoes, which
supposed the infiltration of the sea into ravines containing the
materials which form the fuel of eruptions: but God knows if that is
true. The lofty ones are intermittent--a century, two, ten, of silent
waiting, and then their talk silenced for ever some poor district; the
low ones are constant in action. Who could know the dark way of the
world? Sometimes they form a linear system, consisting of several vents
which extend in one direction, near together, like chimneys of some long
foundry beneath. In mountains, a series of serrated peaks denotes the
presence of dolomites; rounded heads mean calcareous rocks; and needles,
crystalline schists. The preponderance of land in the northern
hemisphere denotes the greater intensity there of the causes of
elevation at a remote geologic epoch: that is all that one can say about
it: but whence that greater intensity? I have some knowledge of the
earth for only ten miles down: but she has eight thousand miles: and
whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do
not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot
sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the
metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and
volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which
constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of
flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know
them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same
furnace of her fiery heart. She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated,
and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise,
and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of
Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and
Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday,
old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like
vihârah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock;
and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo,
and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that
great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well
of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my
cheeks: for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man 'passeth away.'
These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only
that these are round, and mine are square: for I chose it so: but the
same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the
small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine
have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court,
then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the
dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are
crowned with boldly-projecting cornices, surmounted by an abacus. And
here, till the pressing want of food drove me back, I remained: for more
and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I
ask myself this question: 'Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and
become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and
fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic--morose and
turbulent--fitful, and deranged, and sad--like her?'
* * * * *
A whole month of that voyage, from May the 15th to June the 13th, I
wasted at the Andaman Islands near Malay: for that any old Chinaman
could be alive in Pekin began, after some time, to seem the most
quixotic notion that ever entered a human brain; and these jungled
islands, to which I came after a shocking vast orgy one night at
Calcutta, when I fired not only the city but the river, pleased my fancy
to such an extent, that at one time I intended to abide there. I was at
the one called in the chart 'Saddle Hill,' the smallest of them, I
think: and seldom have I had such sensations of peace as I lay a whole
burning day in a rising vale, deeply-shaded in palm and tropical
ranknesses, watching thence the _Speranza_ at anchor: for there was a
little offing here at the shore whence the valley arose, and I could see
one of its long peaks lined with cocoanut-trees, and all cloud burned
out of the sky except the flimsiest lawn-figments, and the sea as
absolutely calm as a lake roughened with breezes, yet making a
considerable noise in its breaking on the shore, as I have noticed in
these sorts of places: I do not know why. These poor Andaman people seem
to have been quite savage, for I met a number of them in roaming the
island, nearly skeletons, yet with limbs and vertebrae still, in
general, cohering, and in some cases dry-skinned and mummified relics of
flesh, and never anywhere a sign of clothes: a very singular thing,
considering their nearness to high old civilisations all about them.
They looked small and black, or almost; and I never found a man without
finding on or near him a spear and other weapons: so that they were
eager folk, and the wayward dark earth was in them, too, as she should
be in her children. They had in many cases some reddish discoloration,
which may have been the traces of betel-nut stains: for betel-nuts
abound there. And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on
board with the gig one of their little tree-canoes: which was my
foolishness: for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from
the decks into the middle of the sea.
* * * * *
I passed down the Straits of Malacca, and in that short distance between
the Andaman Islands, and the S.W. corner of Borneo I was thrice so
mauled, that at times it seemed quite out of the question that anything
built by man could escape such unfettered cataclysms, and I resigned
myself, but with bitter reproaches, to perish darkly. The effect of the
third upon me, when it was over, was the unloosening afresh of all my
evil passion: for I said: 'Since they mean to slay me, death shall find
me rebellious'; and for weeks I could not sight some specially happy
village, or umbrageous spread of woodland, that I did not stop the ship,
and land the materials for their destruction; so that nearly all those
spicy lands about the north of Australia will bear the traces of my hand
for many a year: for more and more my voyage became dawdling and
zigzaged, as the merest whim directed it, or the movement of the pointer
on the chart; and I thought of eating the lotus of surcease and nepenthe
in some enchanted nook of this bowering summer, where from my hut-door I
could see through the pearl-hues of opium the sea-lagoon slaver lazily
upon the old coral atol, and the cocoanut-tree would droop like slumber,
and the bread-fruit tree would moan in sweet and weary dream, and I
should watch the _Speranza_ lie anchored in the pale atol-lake, year
after year, and wonder what she was, and whence, and why she dozed so
deep for ever, and after an age of melancholy peace and burdened bliss,
I should note that sun and moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert,
opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh
'Enough,' and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep: for that any old
Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac,
as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that left
me faint.
During a space of four months, from the 18th June to the 23rd October, I
visited the Fijis, where I saw skulls still surrounded with remnants of
extraordinary haloes of stiff hair, women clad in girdles made of thongs
fixed in a belt, and, in Samoa near, bodies crowned with coronets of
nautilus-shell, and traces of turmeric-paint and tattooing, and in one
townlet a great assemblage of carcasses, suggesting by their look some
festival, or dance: so that I believe that these people were overthrown
without the least fore-knowledge of anything. The women of the Maoris
wore an abundance of green-jade ornaments, and I found a peculiar kind
of shell-trumpet, one of which I have now, also a tattooing chisel, and
a nicely-carved wooden bowl. The people of New Caledonia, on the other
hand, went, I should think, naked, confining their attention to the
hair, and in this resembling the Fijians, for they seemed to wear an
artificial hair made of the fur of some creature like a bat, and also
they wore wooden masks, and great rings--for the ear, no doubt--which
must have fallen to the shoulders: for the earth was in them all, and
made them wild, perverse and various like herself. I went from one to
the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal
resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying
of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the
world. But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me
to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.
* * * * *
One evening, the 29th November, I dined rather late--at eight--sitting,
as was my custom in calm weather, cross-legged on the cabin-rug at the
port aft corner, a small semicircle of _Speranza_ gold-plate before me,
and near above me the red-shaded lamp with green conical reservoir,
whose creakings never cease in the stillest mid-sea, and beyond the
plates the array of preserved soups, meat-extracts, meats, fruit,
sweets, wines, nuts, liqueurs, coffee on the silver spirit-tripod,
glasses, cruet, and so on, which it was always my first care to select
from the store-room, open, and lay out once for all in the morning on
rising. I was late, seven being my hour: for on that day I had been
engaged in the occasionally necessary, but always deferred, task of
overhauling the ship, brushing here a rope with tar, there a board with
paint, there a crank with oil, rubbing a door-handle, a brass-fitting,
filling the three cabin-lamps, dusting mirrors and furniture, dashing
the great neat-joinered plains of deck with bucketfulls, or, high in
air, chopping loose with its rigging the mizzen top-mast, which since a
month was sprained at the clamps, all this in cotton drawers under loose
_quamis_, bare-footed, my beard knotted up, the sun a-blaze, the sea
smooth and pale with the smooth pallor of strong currents, the ship
still enough, no land in sight, yet great tracts of sea-weed making
eastward--I working from 11 A.M. till near 7, when sudden darkness
interrupted: for I wished to have it all over in one obnoxious day. I
was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain-lever
lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner
in the dining-hall corner. I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual,
pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but
never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan
manner, and drinking pretty freely. Still I was tired, and went upon
deck, where I had the threadbare blue-velvet easy-chair with the broken
left arm before the wheel, and in it sat smoking cigar after cigar from
the Indian D box, half-asleep, yet conscious. The moon came up into a
pretty cloudless sky, and she was bright, but not bright enough to
out-shine the enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one
continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint
luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole
trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous
purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic
current. I could hear it, in my slumbrous lassitude, struggling and
gurgling at the tied rudder, and making wet sloppy noises under the
sheer of the poop; and I was aware that the _Speranza_ was gliding along
pretty fast, drawn into that procession, probably at the rate of four to
six knots: but I did not care, knowing very well that no land was within
two hundred miles of my bows, for I was in longitude 173°, in the
latitude of Fiji and the Society Islands, between those two: and after a
time the cigar drooped and dropped from my mouth, and sleep overcame
me, and I slept there, in the lap of the Infinite.
* * * * *
So that something preserves me, Something, Someone: _and for what?_ ...
If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for
lying there on the poop, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed on
the ice, far, far yonder in the forgotten hyperborean North: that I was
in an Arabian paradise, a Garden of Peaches; and I had a very long
vision of it, for I walked among the trees, and picked the fruit, and
pressed the blossoms to my nostrils with breathless inhalations of love:
till a horrible sickness woke me: and when I opened my eyes, the night
was black, the moon gone down, everything wet with dew, the sky arrayed
with most glorious stars like a thronged bazaar of tiaraed rajahs and
begums with spangled trains, and all the air fragrant with that mortal
scent; and high and wide uplifted before me--stretching from the
northern to the southern limit--a row of eight or nine inflamed smokes,
as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean foundry a-work all night, most
solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn night: eight or nine, I
should say, or it might be seven, or it might be ten, for I did not
count them; and from those craters puffed up gusts of encrimsoned
material, here a gust and there a gust, with tinselled fumes that
convolved upon themselves, and sparks and flashes, all veiled in a
garish haze of light: for the foundry worked, though languidly; and upon
a rocky land four miles ahead, which no chart had ever marked, the
_Speranza_ drove straight with the current of the phosphorus sea.
As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of
existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream. I must
at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the
destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood
with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow
crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind
that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory,
or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do
not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with
desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face
as I moved the regulator in the engine-room: but any recollection of
going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not. Happily, the
wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she
must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the
wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head
against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in
sight, and morning breaking.
This made me so sick, that for either two or three days I lay without
eating in the chair near the wheel, only rarely waking to sufficient
sense to see to it that she was making westward from that place; and on
the morning when I finally roused myself I did not know whether it was
the second or the third morning: so that my calendar, so scrupulously
kept, may be a day out, for to this day I have never been at the pains
to ascertain whether I am here writing now on the 5th or the 6th of
June.
* * * * *
Well, on the fourth, or the fifth, evening after this, just as the sun
was sinking beyond the rim of the sea, I happened to look where he hung
motionless on the starboard bow: and there I saw a clean-cut black-green
spot against his red--a most unusual sight here and now--a ship: a poor
thing, as it turned out when I got near her, without any sign of mast,
heavily water-logged, some relics of old rigging hanging over, even her
bowsprit apparently broken in the middle (though I could not see it),
and she nothing more than a hirsute green mass of old weeds and
sea-things from bowsprit-tip to poop, and from bulwarks to water-line,
stout as a hedgehog, only awaiting there the next high sea to founder.
It being near my dinner-hour and night's rest, I stopped the _Speranza_
some fifteen yards from her, and commenced to pace my spacious poop, as
usual, before eating; and as I paced, I would glance at her, wondering
at her destiny, and who were the human men that had lived on her, their
Christian names, and family names, their age, and thought, and way of
life, and beards; till the desire arose within me to go to her, and see;
and I threw off my outer garments, uncovered and unroped the cedar
cutter--the only boat, except the air-pinnace, left to me intact--and
got her down by the mizzen five-block pulley-system. But it was a
ridiculous nonsense, for having paddled to her, I was thrown into
paroxysms of rage by repeated failures to scale her bulwarks, low as
they were; my hands, indeed, could reach, but I found no hold upon the
slimy mass, and three rope-ends which I caught were also untenably
slippery: so that I jerked always back into the boat, my clothes a mass
of filth, and the only thought in my blazing brain a twenty-pound
charge of guncotton, of which I had plenty, to blow her to uttermost
Hell. I had to return to the _Speranza_, get a half-inch rope, then back
to the other, for I would not be baulked in such a way, though now the
dark was come, only slightly tempered by a half-moon, and I getting
hungry, and from minute to minute more fiendishly ferocious. Finally, by
dint of throwing, I got the rope-loop round a mast-stump, drew myself
up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and
all for what? the imperiousness of a whim. The faint moonlight shewed an
ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid
seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of
seaweed. She was a ship of probably 1,500 tons, three-masted, and a
sailer. I got aft (for I had on thick outer babooshes), and saw that
only four of the companion-steps remained; by a small leap, however, I
could descend into that desolation, where the stale sea-stench seemed
concentrated into a very essence of rankness. Here I experienced a
singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or
something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary cabin, with some
fungoids, skulls, bones and rags, but not one cohering skeleton. In the
second starboard berth was a small table, and on the floor a thick
round ink-pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down;
and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved
half-open of itself, for it had been wet and stained. This I took, and
went back to the _Speranza_: for that ship was nothing but an emptiness,
and a stench of the crude elements of life, nearly assimilated now to
the rank deep to which she was wedded, and soon to be absorbed into its
nature and being, to become a sea in little, as I, in time, my God,
shall be nothing but an earth in little.
During dinner, and after, I read the book, with some difficulty, for it
was pen-written in French, and discoloured, and it turned out to be the
journal of someone, a passenger and voyager, I imagine, who called
himself Albert Tissu, and the ship the _Marie Meyer_. There was nothing
remarkable in the narrative that I could see--common-place descriptions
of South Sea scenes, records of weather, cargoes, and the like--till I
came to the last written page: and that was remarkable enough. It was
dated the 13th of April--strange thing, my good God, incredibly
strange--that same day, twenty long years ago, when I reached the Pole;
and the writing on that page was quite different from the neat look of
the rest, proving immoderate excitement, wildest haste; and he heads it
'_Cinq Heures_,'--I suppose in the evening, for he does not say: and he
writes: 'Monstrous event! phenomenon without likeness! the witnesses of
which must for ever live immortalised in the annals of the universe, an
event which will make even Mama, Henri and Juliette admit that I was
justified in undertaking this most eventful voyage. Talking with Captain
Tombarel on the poop, when a sudden exclamation from him--"_Mon Dieu!_"
His visage whitens! I follow the direction of his gaze to eastward! I
behold! eight kilomètres perhaps away--, _ten monstrous waterspouts_,
reaching up, up, high enough--all apparently in one straight line, with
intervals of nine hundred _mètres_, very regularly placed. They do not
wander, dance, nor waver, as waterspouts do; nor are they at all
lily-shaped, like waterspouts: but ten hewn pillars of water, with
uniform diameter from top to bottom, only a little twisted here and
there, and, as I divine, fifty _mètres_ in girth. Five, ten, stupendous
minutes we look, Captain Tombarel mechanically repeating and repeating
under his breath "_Mon Dieu!_" "_Mon Dieu!_" the whole crew now on the
poop, I agitated, but collected, watch in hand. And suddenly, all is
blotted out: the pillars of water, doubtless still there, can no more be
seen: for the ocean all about them is steaming, hissing higher than the
pillars a dense white vapour, vast in extent, whose venomous sibilation
we at this distance can quite distinctly hear. It is affrighting, it is
intolerable! the eyes can hardly bear to watch, the ears to hear! it
seems unholy travail, monstrous birth! But it lasts not long: all at
once the _Marie Meyer_ commences to pitch and roll violently, and the
sea, a moment since calm, is now rough! and at the same time, through
the white vapour, we see a dark shadow slowly rising--the shadow of a
mighty back, a new-born land, bearing upwards ten flames of fire,
slowly, steadily, out of the sea, into the clouds. At the moment when
that sublime emergence ceases, or seems to cease, the grand thought that
smites me is this: "I, Albert Tissu, am immortalised: my name shall
never perish from among men!" I rush down, I write it. The latitude is
16° 21' 13" South; the longitude 176° 58' 19" West[1]. There is a great
deal of running about on the decks--they are descending. There is surely
a strange odour of almonds--I only hope--it is so dark, _mon D_----'
So the Frenchman, Tissu.
[Footnote 1: This must be French reckoning, from meridian of Paris.]
* * * * *
With all that region I would have no more to do: for all here, it used
to be said, lies a great sunken continent; and I thought it would be
rising and shewing itself to my eyes, and driving me stark mad: for the
earth is full of these contortions, sudden monstrous grimaces and
apparitions, which are like the face of Medusa, affrighting a man into
spinning stone; and nothing could be more appallingly insecure than
living on a planet.
I did not stop till I had got so far northward as the Philippine
Islands, where I was two weeks--exuberant, odorous places, but so hilly
and rude, that at one place I abandoned all attempt at travelling in the
motor, and left it in a valley by a broad, shallow, noisy river, full of
mossy stones: for I said: 'Here I will live, and be at peace'; and then
I had a fright, for during three days I could not re-discover the river
and the motor, and I was in the greatest despair, thinking: 'When shall
I find my way out of these jungles and vastnesses?' For I was where no
paths were, and had lost myself in deeps where the lure of the earth is
too strong and rank for a single man, since in such places, I suppose, a
man would rapidly be transformed into a tree, or a snake, or a tiger. At
last, however, I found the place, to my great joy, but I would not shew
that I was glad, and to hide it, fell upon a front wheel of the car with
some kicks. I could not make out who the people were that lived here:
for the relics of some seemed quite black, like New Zealand races, and I
could still detect the traces of tattooing, while others suggested
Mongolian types, and some looked like pigmies, and some like whites. But
I cannot detail the two-years' incidents of that voyage: for it is past,
and like a dream: and not to write of that--of all that--have I taken
this pencil in hand after seventeen long, long years.
* * * * *
Singular my reluctance to put it on paper. I will write rather of the
voyage to China, and how I landed the motor on the wharf at Tientsin,
and went up the river through a maize and rice-land most charming in
spite of intense cold, I thick with clothes as an Arctic traveller; and
of the three dreadful earthquakes within two weeks; and how the only map
which I had of the city gave no indication of the whereabouts of its
military depositories, and I had to seek for them; and of the three
days' effort to enter them, for every gate was solid and closed; and how
I burned it, but had to observe its flames, without deep pleasure, from
beyond the walls to the south, the whole place being one cursed plain;
yet how, at one moment, I cried aloud with wild banterings and glad
laughters of Tophet to that old Chinaman still alive within it; and how
I coasted, and saw the hairy Ainus, man and woman hairy alike; and how,
lying one midnight awake in my cabin, the _Speranza_ being in a still
glassy water under a cliff overhung by drooping trees--it was the
harbour of Chemulpo--to me lying awake came the thought: 'Suppose now
you should hear a step walking to and fro, leisurely, on the poop above
you--_just suppose'_; and the night of horrors which I had, for I could
not help supposing, and at one time really thought that I heard it: and
how the sweat rolled and poured from my brow; and how I went to
Nagasaki, and burned it; and how I crossed over the great Pacific deep
to San Francisco, for I knew that Chinamen had been there, too, and one
of them might be alive; and how, one calm day, the 15th or the 16th
April, I, sitting by the wheel in the mid-Pacific, suddenly saw a great
white hole that ran and wheeled, and wheeled and ran, in the sea, coming
toward me, and I was aware of the hot breath of a reeling wind, and then
of the hot wind itself, which deep-groaned the sound of the letter _V_,
humming like a billion spinning-tops, and the _Speranza_ was on her
side, sea pouring over her port-bulwarks, and myself in the corner
between deck and taffrail, drowning fast, but unable to stir; but all
was soon past and the white hole in the sea, and the hot spinning-top of
wind, ran wheeling beyond, to the southern horizon, and the _Speranza_
righted herself: so that it was clear that someone wished to destroy me,
for that a typhoon of such vehemence ever blew before I cannot think;
and how I came to San Francisco, and how I burned it, and had my sweets:
for it was mine; and how I thought to pass over the great
trans-continental railway to New York, but would not, fearing to leave
the _Speranza_, lest all the ships in the harbour there should be
wrecked, or rusted, and buried under sea-weed, and turned unto the sea;
and how I went back, my mind all given up now to musings upon the earth
and her ways, and a thought in my soul that I would return to those deep
places of the Filipinas, and become an autochthone--a tree, or a snake,
or a man with snake-limbs, like the old autochthones: but I would not:
for Heaven was in man, too: Earth and Heaven; and how as I steamed round
west again, another winter come, and I now in a mood of dismal
despondencies, on the very brink of the inane abyss and smiling idiotcy,
I saw in the island of Java the great temple of Boro Budor: and like a
tornado, or volcanic event, my soul was changed: for my recent studies
in the architecture of the human race recurred to me with interest, and
three nights I slept in the temple, examining it by day. It is vast,
with that look of solid massiveness which above all characterises the
Japanese and Chinese building, my measurement of its width being 529
feet, and it rises terrace-like in six stories to a height of about 120
or 130 feet: here Buddhist and Brahmin forms are combined into a most
richly-developed whole, with a voluptuousness of tracery that is simply
intoxicating, each of the five off-sets being divided up into an
innumerable series of external niches, containing each a statue of the
sitting Boodh, all surmounted by a number of cupolas, and the whole
crowned by a magnificent dagop: and when I saw this, I had the impulse
to return to my home after so long wandering, and to finish the temple
of temples, and the palace of palaces; and I said: 'I will return, and
build it as a testimony to God.'
* * * * *
Save for a time, near Cairo, I did not once stop on that homeward
voyage, but turned into the little harbour at Imbros at a tranquil
sunset on the 7th of March (as I reckon), and I moored the _Speranza_ to
the ring in the little quay, and I raised the battered motor from the
hold with the middle air-engine (battered by the typhoon in the
mid-Pacific, which had broken it from the rope-fastenings and tumbled it
head-over-heels to port), and I went through the windowless
village-street, and up through the plantains and cypresses which I knew,
and the Nile mimosas, and mulberries, and Trebizond palms, and pines,
and acacias, and fig-trees, till the thicket stopped me, and I had to
alight: for in those two years the path had finally disappeared; and on,
on foot, I made my way, till I came to the board-bridge, and leant
there, and looked at the rill; and thence climbed the steep path in the
sward toward that rolling table-land where I had built with many a
groan; and half-way up, I saw the tip of the crane-arm, then the blazing
top of the south pillar, then the shed-roof, then the platform, a
blinking blotch of glory to the watery eyes under the setting sun. But
the tent, and nearly all that it contained, was gone.
* * * * *
For four days I would do nothing, simply lying and watching, shirking a
load so huge: but on the fifth morning I languidly began something: and
I had not worked an hour, when a fever took me--to finish it, to finish
it--and it lasted upon me, with only three brief intervals, nearly seven
years; nor would the end have been so long in coming, but for the
unexpected difficulty of getting the four flat roofs water-tight, for I
had to take down half the east one. Finally, I made them of gold slabs
one-and-a-quarter inch thick, smooth on both sides, on each beam double
gutters being fixed along each side of the top flange to catch any
leakage at the joints, which are filled with slaters'-cement. The slabs
are clamped to the top flanges by steel clips, having bolts set with
plaster-of-Paris in holes drilled in the slabs. These clips are 1-1/2
in. by 3/17 in., and are 17 in. apart. The roofs are slightly pitched to
the front edges, where they drain into gold-plated copper-gutters on
plated wrought-iron brackets, with one side flashed up over the blocks,
which raise the slabs from the beam-tops, to clear the joint gutters....
But now I babble again of that base servitude, which I would forget, but
cannot: for every measurement, bolt, ring, is in my brain, like a
burden: but it is past, it is past--and it was vanity.
* * * * *
Six months ago to-day it was finished: six months more protracted,
desolate, burdened, than all those sixteen years in which I built.
I wonder what a man--another man--some Shah, or Tsar, of that far-off
past, would say now of me, if eye could rest upon me! With what awe
would he certainly shrink before the wild majesty of these eyes; and
though I am not lunatic--for I am not, I am not--how would he fly me
with the exclamation: 'There is the very lunacy of Pride!'
For there would seem to him--it must be so--in myself, in all about me,
something extravagantly royal, touched with terror. My body has
fattened, and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broad
Babylonish girdle of crimson cloth, minutely gold-embroidered, and hung
with silver, copper and gold coins of the Orient; my beard, still black,
sweeps in two divergent sheaves to my hips, flustered by every wind; as
I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its
depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet,
a-glow with luminous stones. I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I
sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, obese old Majesty. Challenge
me who will--challenge me who dare! Among those myriad worlds upon which
I nightly pore, I may have my Peers and Compeers and Fellow-denizens ...
but _here_ I am Sole; Earth acknowledges my ancient sway and hereditary
sceptre: for though she draws me, not yet, not yet, am I hers, but she
is mine. It seems to me not less than a million million aeons since
other beings, more or less resembling me, walked impudently in the open
sunlight on this planet, which is rightly mine--I can indeed no longer
picture to myself, nor even credit, that such a state of things--so
fantastic, so far-fetched, so infinitely droll--could have existed:
though, at bottom, I suppose, I know that it must have been really so.
Up to ten years ago, in fact, I used frequently to dream that there were
others. I would see them walk in the streets like ghosts, and be
troubled, and start awake: but never now could such a thing, I think,
occur to me in sleep: for the wildness of the circumstance would
certainly strike my consciousness, and immediately I should know that
the dream was a dream. For now, at least, I am sole, I am lord. The
golden walls of this palace which I have built look down, enamoured of
their reflection, into a lake of the choicest, purplest wine.
Not that I made it of wine because wine is rare; nor the walls of gold
because gold is rare: that would have been too childish: but because I
would match for beauty a human work with the works of those Others: and
because it happens, by some persistent freak of the earth, that
precisely things most rare and costly are generally the most beautiful.
The vision of glorious loveliness which is this palace now risen before
my eyes cannot be described by pen and paper, though there _may_ be
words in the lexicons of language which, if I sought for them with
inspired wit for sixteen years, as I have built for sixteen years, might
as vividly express my thought on paper, as the stones-of-gold, so
grouped and built, express it to the eye: but, failing such labours and
skill, I suppose I could not give, if there were another man, and I
tried to give, the faintest conception of its celestial charm.
It is a structure positively as clear as the sun, and as fair as the
moon--the sole great human work in the making of which no restraining
thought of cost has played a part: one of its steps alone being of more
cost than all the temples, mosques and besestins, the palaces, pagodas
and cathedrals, built between the ages of the Nimrods and the Napoleons.
The house itself is very small--only 40 ft. long, by 35 broad, by 27
high: yet the structure as a whole is sufficiently enormous, high
uplifted: the rest of the bulk being occupied by the platform, on which
the house stands, each side of this measuring at its base 480 ft., its
height from top to bottom 130 ft, and its top 48 ft. square, the
elevation of the steps being just nearly 30 degrees, and the top reached
from each of the four points of the compass by 183 low long steps, very
massively overlaid with smooth molten gold--not forming a continuous
flight, but broken into threes and fives, sixes and nines, with landings
between the series, these from the top looking like a great terraced
parterre of gold. It is thus an Assyrian palace in scheme: only that the
platform has steps on all sides, instead of on one. The platform-top,
from its edge to the golden walls of the house, is a mosaic consisting
of squares of the glassiest clarified gold, and squares of the glassiest
jet, corner to corner, each square 2 ft. wide. Around the edge of the
platform on top run 48 square plain gold pilasters, 12 on each side, 2
ft. high, tapering upwards, and topped by a knob of solid gold, pierced
with a hole through which passes a lax inch-and-a-half silver chain,
hung with little silver balls which strike together in the breeze. The
mansion consists of an outer court, facing east toward the sea, and the
house proper, which encloses an inner court. The outer court is a hollow
oblong 32 ft. wide by 8 ft. long, the summit of its three walls being
battlemented; they are 18-1/2 ft. in height, or 8-1/2 ft. lower than the
house; around their gold sides, on inside and outside, 3 ft. from the
top, runs a plain flat band of silver, 1 ft. wide, projecting 2/3 in.,
and at the gate, which is a plain Egyptian entrance, facing eastwards,
2-1/2 ft. narrower at top than at bottom, stand the two great square
pillars of massive plain gold, tapering upwards, 45 ft. high, with their
capital of band, closed lotus, and thin plinth; in the outer court,
immediately opposite the gate, is an oblong well, 12 ft. by 3 ft,
reproducing in little the shape of the court, its sides, which are
gold-lined, tapering downward to near the bottom of the platform, where
a conduit of 1/8 in. diameter automatically replenishes the ascertained
mean evaporation of the lake during the year, the well containing
105,360 litres when nearly full, and the lake occupying a circle round
the platform of 980 ft. diameter, with a depth of 3-1/2 ft. Round the
well run pilasters connected by silver chains with little balls, and it
communicates by a 1/8 in. conduit with a pool of wine let into the inner
court, this being fed from eight tall and narrow golden tanks, tapering
upwards, which surround it, each containing a different red wine,
sufficient on the whole to last for all purposes during my lifetime. The
ground of the outer court is also a mosaic of jet and gold: but
thenceforth the jet-squares give place throughout to squares of silver,
and the gold-squares to squares of clear amber, clear as solidified oil.
The entrance is by an Egyptian doorway 7 ft. high, with folding-doors of
gold-plated cedar, opening inwards, surrounded by a very large
projecting coping of plain silver, 3-1/2 ft. wide, severe simplicity of
line throughout enormously multiplying the effect of richness of
material. The interior resembles, I believe, rather a Homeric, than an
Assyrian or Egyptian house--except for the 'galleries,' which are purely
Babylonish and Old Hebrew. The inner court, with its wine-pool and
tanks, is a small oblong of 8 ft. by 9 ft., upon which open four
silver-latticed window-oblongs in the same proportion, and two doors,
before and behind, oblongs in the same proportion. Round this run the
eight walls of the house proper, the inner 10 ft. from the outer, each
parallel two forming a single long corridor-like chamber, except the
front (east) two, which are divided into three apartments; in each side
of the house are six panels of massive plain silver, half-an-inch
thinner in their central space, where are affixed paintings, 22 or else
21 taken at the burning of Paris from a place called 'The Louvre,' and 2
or else 3 from a place in England: so that the panels have the look of
frames, and are surrounded by oval garlands of the palest amethyst,
topaz, sapphire, and turquoise which I could find, each garland being of
only one kind of stone, a mere oval ring two feet wide at the sides and
narrowing to an inch at the top and bottom, without designs. The
galleries are five separate recesses in the outer walls under the roofs,
two in the east façade, and one in the north, south, and west, hung with
pavilions of purple, blue, rose and white silk on rings and rods of
gold, with gold pilasters and banisters, each entered by four steps from
the roof, to which lead, north and south, two spiral stairs of cedar. On
the east roof stands the kiosk, under which is the little lunar
telescope; and from that height, and from the galleries, I can watch
under the bright moonlight of this climate, which is very like
lime-light, the for-ever silent blue hills of Macedonia, and where the
islands of Samothraki, Lemnos, Tenedos slumber like purplish fairies on
the Aegean Sea: for, usually, I sleep during the day, and keep a
night-long vigil, often at midnight descending to bathe my coloured
baths in the lake, and to disport myself in that strange intoxication of
nostrils, eyes, and pores, dreaming long wide-eyed dreams at the bottom,
to return dazed, and weak, and drunken. Or again--_twice_ within these
last void and idle six months--I have suddenly run, bawling out, from
this temple of luxury, tearing off my gaudy rags, to hide in a hut by
the shore, smitten for one intense moment with realisation of the past
of this earth, and moaning: 'alone, alone ... all alone, alone, alone
... alone, alone....' For events precisely resembling eruptions take
place in my brain; and one spangled midnight--ah, how spangled!--I may
kneel on the roof with streaming, uplifted face, with outspread arms,
and awe-struck heart, adoring the Eternal: the next, I may strut like a
cock, wanton as sin, lusting to burn a city, to wallow in filth, and,
like the Babylonian maniac, calling myself the equal of Heaven.
* * * * *
But it was not to write of this--of all this--!
Of the furnishing of the palace I have written nothing.... But why I
hesitate to admit to myself what I _know_, is not clear. If They speak
to me, I may surely write of Them: for I do not fear Them, but am Their
peer.
Of the island I have written nothing: its size, climate, form,
vegetation.... There are two winds: a north and a south wind; the north
is cool, and the south is warm; and the south blows during the winter
months, so that sometimes on Christmas-day it is quite hot; and the
north, which is cool, blows from May to September, so that the summer is
hardly ever oppressive, and the climate was made for a king. The
mangal-stove in the south hall I have never once lit.
The length, I should say, is 19 miles; the breadth 10, or thereabouts;
and the highest mountains should reach a height of some 2,000 ft.,
though I have not been all over it. It is very densely wooded in most
parts, and I have seen large growths of wheat and barley, obviously
degenerate now, with currants, figs, valonia, tobacco, vines in rank
abundance, and two marble quarries. From the palace, which lies on a
sunny plateau of beautifully-sloping swards, dotted with the circular
shadows thrown by fifteen huge cedars, and seven planes, I can see on
all sides an edge of forest, with the gleam of a lake to the north, and
in the hollow to the east the rivulet with its little bridge, and a few
clumps and beds of flowers. I can also spy right through----
* * * * *
It shall be written now: