"How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark-blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!"
Night really unrobes her beauty only in silence, the silence of the
desert. Never can I forget nights spent in Western Australia, far
beyond Kalgoorlie, away back in the Never-Never Land, where no rain
falls. That is the land of great thirst, where for hundreds of miles
one sees no living thing, where no birds sing, not even the mournful
call of the jackal echoes across the waste, and not even the chirping
ticking of an insect is to be heard to break the utter stillness. Gum
trees, whose roots strike down a hundred feet for water, lift up their
sparsely-covered branches into the motionless air above, their
tongue-like leaves silently saying "I thirst." In that stagnant air
they remind one of the giant seaweeds that grow in the depths of the
great oceans where the water never moves; and the silence there is the
silence of ocean depths, and so has been from the beginning. To-day my
horse's tracks made five years ago are probably as fresh as were those
which I followed that had been made two years before that time. It
must be experienced to be realised, that dead silence; when lying on
the ground at night the sound of one's heart-beats or the breathing of
one's horse, tethered yards away, alone tells one that the sense of
hearing is not lost. It must be experienced to be loved, that wonder
of a silent world, where the Spirit of Solitude in his own domain for
ever almost palpably seems to brood with finger on pressed lips. It
is the contrast with the scene that lies below me that forcibly
recalls these nights in the desert. Now, as I write, I am at the
Antipodes, and focus points of contrast in every sense to these
scenes; the same moon that shines on that far-off desert is the only
thing in common.
The city of New York is in the form of a wedge, the point of the wedge
being the down-town end, a great black mass that now looks driven into
the moonlit water. Down here, as if with sheer weight of pressure of
crowding humanity, the houses seem driven upward. There being not
enough room on the end of the wedge for the people, they are forced
upwards for room, as one would squeeze paint from an artist's tube.
They rise up in tall, irregular-shaped shafts of various heights, as a
child might stand its long toy bricks on end anyhow. As I write I am
looking down from the thirtieth story of one of the highest, feeling
as if I had been "set on the pinnacle of the Temple" (of Mammon?).
The great city lies below me, but though it is night it does not
appear to lie in repose. If it sleeps, it is a restless, troubled
sleep. The air is vocal with many noises that come up from below as an
exhalation; white flames of steam wave from the tops of buildings
below me. Up here on this giddy height a hot wind of the upper air is
blowing, and a vibrating, murmurous throbbing pulsates through the
building itself. This latter is caused by the elevators, those veins
and arteries of the structure, and their motion must never cease or
else a clot of humanity would be left marooned in the upper storeys.
Across the river on the west side a row of lights are moving in one
direction, and alongside them a row moving in the opposite, like ants
at work. These are the trolly-cars crossing Brooklyn Bridge. North and
south, to the sound of a jangling rattle, the trams on the Elevated
are moving, and along the streets the trolly-cars, with their booming
note, which crescendoes up the scale with increasing speed and
diminuendoes with the slackening of it. Out on the water the red and
green lights of the steamers move about in irregular tracks. The
booming, mournful call of these steamers, like the lowing of a cow for
her lost calf, goes on for ever. There are times in the desert when
the coyote and the jackal are silent; on forlorn coasts in the hours
before the first of dawn the seagulls cease their screaming; but these
voices are never silent, calling, circling, and cawing, calling around
the City of Unrest. Different notes they sound--the angry scream of
the steam siren, the deep boom of the incoming ocean liner, and the
note one hears oftenest--a mournful, lost wail, as of a damned soul
calling out, "Custos, quid de nocte?" "Custos, quid de nocte?" The
feverish hours pass troublously, but there is no response in the night
of the City of Unrest.
Now a great change has come over the scene; the moon has been
curtained off by a heavy mass of clouds, and its light is shut off
from the water. The lights of the city shine out with increased
distinctness; the moonlight that whitened the sides of the buildings
now has left them black masses of vague shadow, and all at once one
gets the impression of looking down into an inverted firmament studded
with countless stars of as various magnitudes as in the heavens, from
the bright electric arc-lights to tiny gaslights; and from this height
of over 400 feet one gets the impression, familiar to those who have
looked at the world from a balloon, that the rim of the horizon rises
all round. "Around the circle of the desert spreads," but the desert
now is of the cloud-covered sky, and far as the eye can reach are the
stars of this great city, and now through that firmament of stars
there is a dark path in an unilluminated Milky Way which marks the
course of the river.
As one looks down from here and listens to the combination of
throbbing sounds that come up from below, there is a certain
impressiveness in the thought of being in the centre of such focused
activity. One seems to be pressing the ear close to the heart of a
great country. I wonder what that other city looked like from the
pinnacle of whose temple He looked down on the other great cities that
had their day? What Carthage looked like? The present edition of Rome
and Paris and London, and Pekin from the Imperial pagodas on the top
of Coal Hill, I have looked down on at night, but none of them is like
this. From the Capitol Rome lies quietly wrapped in the memories of
past greatness; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here
and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin,
looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is
squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the
tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps
in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a
solidly-built, healthy man, London sleeps soundly; but the strenuous,
restless activity of this city can hardly be said to sleep. I watched
it make an attempt at a pause for five minutes on the day of the
President's funeral. At an appointed time all the street traffic was
supposed to stand still. My! what an effort it was! It was not a real
pause; it seemed more like the gasping holding of the city's breath,
holding for these five minutes as if something were going to burst;
and then at the second when the clock marked the end of the five
minutes on went everything spinning with a feeling of absolute relief.
As one looks down from here one cannot help speculating as to what is
to be the future of what lies below. Is it going to be the greatest
city that the world has ever seen--in real greatness, or only in acute
development of material civilisation; and are the multitudes that
populate it going to get more happiness from the arcs of their little
lives than those of Carthage and Rome, or Pekin, or Babylon, or
London? Or are they going at the pace that kills? Or at least the pace
that tires into premature exhaustion?
But leaving these speculations, as it is now one o'clock, I get into
the cage of the elevator and drop down whirring as the floors toss
upwards beyond me--"Down twenty-eight," and we pull up with a jerk,
and a pale-faced man gets in. "Down twelve," and two tired-looking
women and a small boy get on board; and then the floor on which is a
newspaper office, and a crowd is waiting to descend. The paper is just
going to press, and their work is done. And then right down below the
level of the street I go to see the paper actually printed. Immense
rolls of paper are being lowered from the street level and handled as
easily as if they were of no more weight than a lead pencil, put
before machines which devour them to a deafening noise of machinery.
The room reminds one of the lower deck of an ironclad in action, and
the workers there seem fighting for their lives--fighting against
time, fighting against the machine, fighting against the paper, which
would fill up the room if it were left at the discharging end of the
machines without being sent rapidly aloft; and there on the floor
above the men are fighting hand to hand with great bundles of papers
that must be sent out in time for the morning trains. Outside in the
square stand horses sufficient for the artillery of an army corps
awaiting their burdens, and as I go up town by the surface car,
although there is not yet any sign of light, I pass hundreds of men on
their way down town to make an early start in the battle struggle of a
new day in the City of Unrest.