THE VOYAGE TO BROOLYI
OH, the ecstasy of that first day! To hear the accents of my native
tongue around me, to see the features of the men I loved, after the long
months of sojourn amongst strange peoples! It seemed years since I had
used English, or spoken soul to soul with any human being. I dared not
laugh or express my joy; I feared lest my utterance should be so
overdone that I would seem mad. I sat and reined in my passion of
reminiscence, waiting for the ebb of its inundating waters. My whole
being was flooded with the intoxication of the familiar thoughts and
moods of the past. I asked my old comrades to let me lie and meditate a
while, and as soon as a meal was prepared, they might call me. As I lay
I felt the memories of my boyhood and youth play upon me like the sweet
sunshine of my old home in summer. I could have lived thus for ever. No
utterance could have measured the happiness of my soul. Then the last
touch to the overbalancing of my emotion was given by Sandy Macrae, my
steward. As he moved about below preparing the table, he burst out into
“Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonny Doon.” The tears rolled down my cheeks, nor
could I tell whether they came from sadness over the graves of the past
or joy flooding every pore of my existence. He had a fine voice that
tided with waves of emotion; and as he wailed forth, “And I sae weary,
fu’ o’ care,” I broke into low sobbing. It was as if the spirits of my
loved dead were speaking to me across the years and bidding me come to
them, as if the voice of lament rang out of the unseen. Every nerve in
my being quivered on the edge of song; I was shaken like a harp in the
wind. Oh, if only I could have found utterance for this music of the
infinite that was thrilling athwart my heartstrings! Nothing would come
but tears.
The song ceased, and I fell back into the dull and joyless lethargy that
follows great excitement. Life was a grey mist without vision beyond the
immediate sensation. Annihilation—any change from this blank
existence—would have been a delight. A shiver ran through my frame, as
if some enemy had crossed my grave.
Again the pathos of the voice found full expression in “The Flowers of
the Forest,” that beautiful threnody over the graveyards of dead ages;
and the sense of the swift oblivion that overtakes even the greatest of
the past came upon me. This earth was but a funeral orb of vanished pomp
and ambition, a vast God’s-acre, wherein a few years or ages mingled the
epitaph and the graven tombstone with the forgotten dust. The whole of
life was but a burial procession into a nameless past, a series of
everlasting farewells on the brink of an infinite oblivion. That all
this passion and sadness and weeping should vanish without effect! That
the singer should lie in the same unremembered dissolution as the sung!
That the sighs and groans and cruel rendings of the heart that make up
so much of the tale of life should be, within a few decades, as much
forgotten as to-day’s zephyr or yesterday’s storm! That even this
funeral orb should itself within a brief period of the life of our
universe blacken and shrivel into death! The shrilling “a’ wede away”
pierced the very heart as it sent these thoughts through my brain.
The ringing of the breakfast bell threw me with almost volcanic impetus
out into the commonplace world of working and sleeping and feeding. I
was soon replenishing the exhausted fires of energy, and the close of
the meal found me rid of sentiment and settled into everyday feelings
and purposes. We put out to sea that we might escape any hue and cry
that might arise from the disappearance of Sneekape or the outbreak of
the revolution of the slaves of Figlefia. It was not long till we had
left that island a speck on the horizon scarce distinguishable from our
smoke that lounged cloudlike across our wake, and we were deep in the
history of our adventures.
The sailing-captain of the _Daydream_, Alick Burns, acted as spokesman,
with a court of appeal in my old guide through Aleofane, Blastemo, and
my steward, Sandy Macrae. After seeing me safe aboard the Tirralarian
falla, they set out for Broolyi; but they had not reached it, for they
were driven off by a great storm, and, in battling against it so as to
prevent drifting into the circle of mist, they had exhausted their fuel,
and had to make for the nearest islands of the archipelago they could
find. Blastemo thought they were approaching a group of islands that was
inhabited by the fiercest and most quarrelsome savages to be found
within the rim of fog. Nothing could tame them or reduce their vanity
and belief in their greatness and invincibility. When exiled from their
respective communities, their ancestors had been of the ordinary size
and usual proportions of men. But in the process of the generations they
had gradually grown into pigmies with increasingly venomous
dispositions. Their shores were the most inhospitable for all strangers,
and no falla would approach them except under dire necessity. Stories of
their inhumanity and towering conceit were told all over the
archipelago. If they had as much ability to unite and as much power as
they had venom and inflated self-esteem, they would dominate the whole
earth. Happily, they were a feeble folk, still more enfeebled by their
mutual envies and jealousies and dissensions. Yet they did all the harm
they could, and especially delighted in getting the weak or invalid or
sensitive amongst them to whom to apply their tortures.
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