Someone stumbled down the bridge ladder for which I was making. I
could see nothing, but I heard the voice of the chief mate. He was
annoyed with himself. Since nightfall our steamer had been without
body, except the place where one stood. With a steady look it was just
possible to find faith in the substance of the alleyway where the
two of us paused to gossip, for its white paint might have been the
adherence to the ship of the faintest trace of the day which had gone.
Somewhere ahead of us a promontory of Africa reached almost to our
course. Our course was laid just to miss it. We were keeping watch for
its light. But if the void at the world’s end had been under our prow
we should not have known it. It was a dark night. An iron door in the
alleyway clanged open with an explosion of light. The light projected
solidly overside, with an Arab fireman brightly encased in it, who was
emptying sacks of ash.
Before daybreak the roar of our cable woke me. When I peered through
the cabin port I thought we had anchored in the midst of a cluster of
stars. That was Oran. I should see Africa in the morning. When we left
Barry Dock with coal the weather was like the punishment for sin; but
tomorrow we should see a white town in the sun, the descendants of the
Salee rovers, and Africa--Africa for the first time.
Those first impressions! Quite often our first impression of a place is
also our last, and it depends solely upon the weather and the food.
This is not doing justice to the world. We shall never learn enough
to do justice to our world unless there is something in this talk of
transmigration and metamorphosis. I might, for instance, have written
down Oran as a mere continuation of the coast of Wales, because next
morning the captain and I landed at a jetty, wearing oilskins. This was
Africa’s coral strand--how quaint it is, the way the romantic use the
facts!--and the grandchildren of the Sallee rovers were carrying coal
in baskets, from which black liquid poured down their bodies. To judge
by their appearance of bowed and complete submission, every drop of
pirate blood had been washed out of them long ago.
There might have been mountains behind the town, though it was hard to
see them. Something seemed to be there, but it was thin and smeared.
Africa, so far as I could see it that morning, was the office of a
shipping agent, where we gossiped of steamers and men we knew, looked
at maps on the walls, and wondered what the agent’s fading photographs
represented. Then we caught an electric tram, which took us to an hotel
in a French town, a town well-ordered and righteously commercial,
and garrisoned by French soldiers in cherry-colored bloomers; for
this was years ago. The bedroom had a tiled floor, but no fireplace,
because the house was built on the theory that we were in Africa, and
by getting under a red bale of eiderdown one managed to keep from
perishing.
Well, Oran chose to show itself the next morning. You could see then
that Wales was very far to the north. Winter, perhaps, had found out in
the night that it was in the wrong place. It had gone home. It was not
worth while returning to the ship, so I stayed ashore.
The best moments of a traveller are not likely to be divined from the
list of the ship’s ports of call. They are inconsequential. It is no
good looking for them. They do not seem to be native to any particular
spot on earth. They have no relation to the chart. It is impossible
to define every one of their elements, and, worse luck, they are
not rewards for endurance and patience. You do not go to them. They
surprise you as you pass. Nor should they serve as material for travel
narrative unless you would make your report delusive, for they have no
geographical bearings. Nobody is likely to find them again. It is no
good talking about them. Yet without them travel would be worse than
the job of the urban dust collector. The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and there is no telling how and in what place the happy incidence of
light and understanding will come.
Last summer, when walking through a sunken Dorsetshire lane, there
was the ghost of an odour I knew, though I could not name it; and at
that moment I began to think of a man I met in France early in the
war. I climbed the bank to see what was growing above. Bean flowers!
Any survivor of the First Hundred Thousand will remember that odour
while he lives. The memory of Hesketh Prichard and the smell of bean
flowers make for me the same apparition: the white bones of Ypres in
the first June of it. Smell is likely to have much to do with a first
impression. The Somme battleground, once you were under its threat, I
think, was raw marl and smoking rubbish. It doesn’t do, to-day, to walk
unexpectedly into the whiff of a place where old rubbish is mouldering
in a field on a moist day, not if you are with friends; they may think
you are mad; they would not be far wrong, either.
Yes, smell has a lot to do with it. It recalls what the eye registered,
put away, and forgot. I shall never forget my first voyage, not while
steam tractors are allowed to poison and destroy the streets of London.
The gust of hot grease from one of them, as it thunders past, pictures
for me what could be seen of the North Sea (December, too!) from the
companion hatch of a trawler; a world black and ghast upset out of the
sunrise and running down to founder us. The breath of the engine-room
puffed up the hatch as she rolled. She had an over-heated bearing
somewhere, for the engines had been racing all night; it had been one
of those nights at sea. The coaming of the hatch was wet and cold, and
the hard wind tasted of iron and salt. The steward was knocking about
the coffee cups at the foot of the ladder; but I did not want any. For
some unreasonable cause now I do not object to the greasy smell and
thunder of steam tractors.