H. M. Tomlinson

“ Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the earth as a great and shining sphere. There were no fences and private bounds. I saw for the first time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our ambit. That bare shoulder of the world effaced regions and constellations in the sky. Our earth had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living body. The abundant rain was vital, and the forest I saw, nobler in stature and with an aspect of intensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, rose like a sign of life triumphant. ”

“ There it is, thirty miles wide between the horns of the land, a bay opening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midst of the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon like a faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an area of opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when no island can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon the favour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimes invisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of the coast we see far over the sea in dreams ”

“ Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the steamer's bridge. There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voice again, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of the River in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamer glides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column. Out she goes, turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slow way down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after another all the fixed lights. ”

“ Travel is delightful in the morning, with a young sun giving the sparkling sense that all is new and for the first time, and that shadows are, after all, but a sport of happy light. By the afternoon that freshness has gone, and one suspects the ship is uselessly rocking without progress, fixed in the clutch of some sleeping but eternal power which has forgotten, or does not know, that men do not live forever. One would then destroy Time, the tyrant, and with his own scythe, if suddenly he turned into an alleyway bearing his damnable glass. ”

“ I see it now, one of those restricted forest openings to which we often went, the wall of the jungle all round, and some small attalea palms left standing, the green of their long plumes as hard and bright as though varnished. Nothing else is there that is green, except the weeds which came when the sunlight was let in by the axe. The spindly forest columns rise about, pallid in a wall of gloom, draped with withered stuff and dead cordage. Their far foliage is black and undistinguishable against the irregular patch of overhead blue. ”

“ And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerly weather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is a twilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy light of aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that western light, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment of impersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet, and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of the west; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, an icy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. ”

“ The heaven alone is trite and plain. The wharves, the factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope and industry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn, fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution. Out on the River a dark body moves past; it has bright eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes.
There is a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and had stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. ”

“ Just beyond him was a group of amber houses, of bamboo thatched with palm fronds. They were, as you have guessed, screened by the green pennants of plantains, and were shadowed by cocoanut palms; and—as they would, of course, in such a composition—they stood on the brow of a hill which descended in steps of radiant emerald, in terraces of young rice, to a plain so far below us that the river there was only a silver wire threading checker-work too distinct and vivid to be anything but the masterpiece of an imaginative decorator. ”

“ If Time playfully imprisons us in a century we would rather have missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed to wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, and where to miss the last train—supposing it runs at all—is the right end to a perfect day of blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter when we find that the whole of it is shaken by a single idea? ”

“ But this tropical jungle, at dayfall, is not the earth we know. It is a celestial vision, beyond physical attaining, beyond knowledge. It is ulterior, glorious, transient, fading before our surprise and wonder fade. We of the “Capella” are its only witnesses, except those pale ghosts, the egrets about the dim aqueous base of the forest.
Darkness comes quickly, the swoop and overspread of black wings. The stopping of the ship’s heart, because the pulsations of her body have had unconscious response in yours, as by an incorporeal ligament, is the cessation of your own life. ”

“ At the landward end of the waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harsh with barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grew to one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black and gold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in the timber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent of travel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored at the quay I left that morning. ”

“ The Windhover, being free, I suppose, began to dance. The sun came up. The seas were on the march. Just behind us was London, asleep and unsuspecting under the brown depression of its canopy; and as to this surprise of light and space so near to that city, so easily entered, yet for so long merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our streets to which the ships and the wharves gave credence—how shall the report of it sound true? Not at all, except to those who still hold to a faith, through all foul times, in the chance hints of a better world. ”

“ We were on the abysmal floor of a growth which was not trees, but the hoary pediments of a structure which was too high and vast for human sight. We rode in the basal gloom of it, no more than lost ants there, at an immeasurable depth in the atmosphere. The roof of the world was far away. Somewhere was the sun, for occasionally there was a well which its light had filled, and a grove of green palms, complete and personal, standing at the bottom of the well, living and reasonable shapes. Or one of the morphos would flicker among those spectral bastions, aerial and bright as a fairy in Hades. ”

“ Yet the common sky of North Africa might be the heaven of the first morning, innocent of knowledge that night is to come. It is not a hard blue roof; your sight is lost in the atmosphere which is azure. The sun more than shines; his beams ring on the rocks, and glance in colours from the hills. From a distance the flowers on a hill slope will pour down to the sea in such a torrent of hues that you might think the arch of the rainbow you saw there had collapsed in the sun and was now rills and cascades. ”

“ Royden remembered that the captain had told him he might go up to the bridge whenever he felt like it. He fumbled in the gloom forward of the deck house for the handrail of the ladder to the bridge, and felt his way up. For a moment he thought nobody was there, that the ship had been left to go where she pleased. Then he saw the head of a Malay, just the head in the darkness, apparently self-luminous, suspended, and with its eyes cast downward, as though steadfastly contemplating the invisible body it had left. ”

“ The foreshore to them is the unending monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas bracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind. ”

“ Till then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Behind us was the jungle front. It changed from green to gold, a band of light between the river and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged majestically. It was the first time that day we had really seen the features of the jungle. It was but a momentary revelation. The clouds were reflectors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills astern of us ravines hitherto unsuspected caught the transitory glory. The dark heights had many polished facets. ”

“ That is why nothing can compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous spectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly and founder us in original gloom. ”

“ It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its translucent deeps. ”

“ Macassar was merely getting daily what the rich and vast workshop outside considered was not quite what it meant to do. And that workshop has, of course, plenty of time and light in which to satisfy itself. The sun and the warm seas have all eternity in which to play with life, to shape and color it to the likeness of whatever perfection was once hinted. The Italian jeweler of the Renaissance never approached the easy opulence, the merry variety of ideas, and the wild ornamentation, which can be seen any bright morning on the slabs of that fish market of Celebes. ”

“ At the time this did not seem an unhappy thought, though the relic had been our last witness, so enduring was the tenuous brightness of the place, the shrine of our particular star, the visible aura of earth. We rarely see it. It is something to be reminded it is not lost; that we cannot, whatever else we can do, put out a celestial light.
Above the steep beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and mussel shells. ”

“ To stand at the end of the bridge, rolling out over the cataracts roaring below, and to swing back, and out again, watching the ship's head decline into a hollow of the seas, and then to clutch the saddle as she reared with a sudden twist and swing above the horizon, and in such a vast and illuminated theatre, was to awake to a new virtue in life. ”

“ The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at noon. It is only a sombre thought still, as at midnight. It is still, at noon, so obscure and dumb a presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate it so much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We are revealed instead. The presence sees us advancing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and impudent intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does not resent us. ”

“ Beyond them the coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from their places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer.
It is the sublimation of earth. Our own shining globe floats with the others in a sea of light. ”