Because I am a light and uneasy sleeper I can hear, at a quarter to six
every morning, the distant subterranean sound of a peculiarly energetic
bell. It rings for about one minute, and it is a signal at which They
quit their drowsy beds. And all along the Riviera coast, from Toulon to
San Remo, in the misty and chill dawn, They are doing the same thing,
beginning the great daily conspiracy to persuade me, and those like me,
that we are really the Sultan, and that our previous life has been a
dream. I sink back into slumber and hear the monotonous roar of the
tideless Mediterranean in my sleep. The Mediterranean, too, is in the
conspiracy. It is extremely inconvenient and annoying to have to go
running about after a sea which wanders across half a mile of beach
twice a day; appreciating this, and knowing the violent objection of
sultans to any sort of trouble, the Mediterranean dispenses with a tide;
at any hour it may be found tirelessly washing the same stone. After
an interval of time, during which a quarter to six in the morning has
receded to the middle of the night, I wake up wide, and instantly, in
Whitman’s phrase,