Morley Roberts

“ And then we came to the top of the pass where rocks jutted out of the snow, and a few minutes' climb let us look over into Italy, and down the steep south side of Monte Rosa, under whose white clouds lay Macugnaga. We sat upon the summit for an hour and ate once more, and argued as to the beauty of things, and the wonder and foolishness of climbing, and I own that I was very hard to satisfy. The snow-grind had entered into my soul as it always does. It is duller than a walk through any flat agricultural country before the corn begins to grow. ”

“ On the lofty sloping plains of Texas and Kansas the air is often keen at night, even in the summer time. And what it is in winter let train hands on the Texas Pacific declare. But in the warmer season, when northers have ceased to blow, it has an intoxicating, thrilling quality only comparable to the breath of the higher South African veldt. It is good to be alive then, and the glory of the morning is an excellent and moving glory since it wakes one to swift activity and the very joy of being. ”

“ For, after all, with good guides and good weather there is little real danger. The main thing is to get a sensation out of it; [Pg 225] the feeling of absorption in the moment which prevents one thinking of anything but the next step. A snow-grind is like a book which has to be read and which has no interest. I can imagine many reviewers must have their literary snow-grinds. And so we crawled along the surface of the snow with never a big crevasse to enliven one, and the sun rose up and peered across the vast curves of white and almost blinded us. ”

“ From the last ash-peak of fire, as I stood on the crater walls in smoke and a cold wind, I saw no sign of Teneriffe's fertility. The works of man upon the lower slopes below the piñon forests were invisible. The slopes by Orotava lay under cloud, the sea was hidden almost to its horizon by a vast plain of heaving mist. All I could see plainly was the old crater itself, barren, vast, tremendous, with its fire-scarred walls and its fumaroles. To the west some smoked still, smoked furiously. ”

“ Many of the houses are no more than one-storey bungalows; half the folks one saw were [Pg 89] coloured; a rare Malay woman flaunted colour like a tropic bird. Avenues of pines resembled huge scrub; they cast strong shadows even in the greyness of the day. Far above the huge ramparts of Table Mountain lay the clouds, and the wind whistled mournfully from the organ pipes of the Devil's Peak. In unoccupied lands were great patches of wild arum, and suddenly I saw the gaunt Australian blue gum, which flourishes here just as well as the English oak. ”

“ They consoled me by saying that we should soon be at the Shoulder, and that it would not take long to reach the summit. I did not believe them and I said I should never do it. But when we got to the Shoulder I was glad. I knew many turned back at that point. We sat down to rest. The guides talked their own German, not one word of which I could understand, so turned from them and looked at the vast upper wedge of the Matterhorn. It glowed red in the morning sun; it was red hot, vast, ponderous, and yet the lower mountain held it up as lightly as an ashen shaft holds up a bronze spear-head. ”

“ In my own humble opinion, very little above the snow-line is truly beautiful. It is often desolate, sometimes intolerably grand and savage, but lovely it is very rarely. It is perhaps against human nature to be there at all. There is nothing to be got there but health, which flies from us in the city. If life were wholly natural, and men lived in the open air, I think that few would take to climbing. And yet now it has become a passion with many. There are few who will not tell you they do it on account of the beauty of the upper world. ”

“ What happens when the people are plastic and their circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, but not entirely beyond conjecture for one who has heard the siren songs of the African veldt, the Australian plain, and the American prairie. ”

“ I came at last to the little wind-swept divide between Table Mountain and the Lion's Head. Here Capetown was lost to me, and I stood among sandy wastes where thin pines and whin-like bushes grow. And further still was the cold grey sea with the waves breaking on a rocky point and a little island all awash with white water.
Though beyond this divide the air was cold as death, the slopes of Table Mountain sweeping to the sea were full of colour; deep, strong, stern colour. When the sun shines and full summer rules upon the Cape Peninsula the place must be glorious. ”

“ All trouble in this wicked world was due to Rhodes; if Rhodes had not been born, or had had the grace to die very early, South Africa would have been little less than a Paradise. Rhodes was a bad man, whose chief aim was to drag the English flag in the dirt. Rhodes was Apollyon and a financier, and the foul fiend himself. And as the old man worked himself into a spluttering rage, he emphasised every point in his declamation by a furious slap, not on his own knee, but on the knee of the journalist who was interpreting for me. ”

“ And yet the sun shines on Confital and both bays, and on the Isleta, which is red and yellow and a fine atmospheric blue away towards Point Confital, where the sea thunders for ever and breaks in high foam like a breaking geyser. On the beach at one's feet often lie Portuguese men-of-war, thrown up by the sea. They are wonderful purple and blue, and very poisonous to touch, as so many beautiful things of the sea are. ”

“ But anything was, and is, better than to stand face to face with busy crowds. To have to talk, to argue, to explain to the unsympathetic was overmuch. The veldt called to them: it is their passion. As one labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks, so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the beasts he loves to hunt. ”

“ Across the valley, or the Kloof, I saw the lower grassy slopes of Table Mountain, where the trees dwindled till they dotted the hill-side like spare scrub. Above the trees is a cut in the mountain, above that the bare grass, and then the frowning weather-worn bastions of the mountain with its ancient horizontal strata. It is cut and scarped into gullies and chimneys; for the mountain climber it offers difficult and impossible climbs at every point. Down the upper gullies hung wisps of ragged cloud, pouring over from the plateau 4000 feet above the town. ”

“ To a miner, or indeed to anyone in want of money, as I usually was when knocking about in Australian or American mining districts, the one painful thing is to know where untold quantities of gold lie without being able to get a single pennyweight of it. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on the banks of the Fraser River in British Columbia, or of the Illinois River in Oregon, pondering on the absurdity of my needing a hundred dollars when millions were in front of me under those fast-flowing streams. ”

“ He made me a couch on the floor in a kind of lumber-room, and, softened child of civilisation that I had become, I growled by myself at what he gave, and wondered what, in the name of the devil who wanders over the earth, I was doing there. And how could he endure it? How, indeed. I fell asleep, and the next minute, which was six hours later, I awoke, and stumbled with a dusty mouth into the remaining night, not yet become dawn. ”

“ But as we walk towards them the light gets stronger, almost intolerably strong, and when one is among them they deceive the eye so that distances seem doubled. And they lie and move in the wind. Day after day I watched them, and walked upon them, and on no two days were they alike; their contours changed perpetually, changed beneath one's eyes like yellow drifting snow. ”

“ But though this disunited unity seemed to me a salient feature in cis-Zambesian Africa, it was the differences in that natural ring fence which attracted most of my attention as a story-writer even as a story-writer who so far has only written one tale about it. I began to ask myself how it was that, with one eminent exception, our African fiction writers had confined themselves to the native races, and the friction between these races and white men, Boer or English, when there were infinitely more attractive themes at hand. ”

“ And yet, in spite of everything, he has some of that dignity which comes from strength and a long habit of getting his own way. But the dignity is not the dignity of the statesman, it is that dignity which is sometimes seen under the blouse of an old French peasant who still remains the head of the family though his hands are past work. I felt face to face with the past as I sat opposite him. ”

“ A DAY IN CAPETOWN
I went across the Parade, which every morning is full of cheap-jack auctioneers selling all things under the sun to Kaffirs, Malays, coolies, towards Rondebosch and Wynberg. At the Castle the electric tram passed me, and I jumped on board and went, at the least, as fast as an English slow train. The wind was blowing and the dust flew, but ahead of us ran a huge electricity-driven water-cart, a very water tram, which laid the red clouds for us. Yet in London we travel painfully in omnibuses and horse-trams, and the rare water-cart is still drawn by horses. ”

“ The Portuguese are wholly inoffensive, except when their pride is touched. In politics, or when they hunger after African territory we fancy needed for our own people, they may not seem so. When a rebuff excites them against the English, Lisbon may not be pleasant for Englishmen. But in such cases would London commend itself to a triumphant foreigner? For my own part, I found a kind of gentle, unobtrusive politeness even among those Portuguese who knew I was English when I went to Lisbon on the last occasion of the two nations quarrelling about a mud flat on the Zambesi. ”

“ With every degree of West longitude the fibre of the American grows harder. The Dustman Destiny sifting his cinders has his biggest mesh over the Pacific States. If charity and sympathy be to seek in the East, it is at a greater discount on the Slope. The only poor-house is the House of Correction. Perhaps San Francisco is one of the hardest, if not the hardest city in the world. Speaking from my own experience, and out of the experience gathered from a thousand miserable bedfellows in the streets, I can say I think it is, not even excepting Portland in Oregon. ”

“ What a woman wants done is always the most important thing on earth. She used to ask me to do up her acre of a garden in between times when the sheep wanted water or twenty horses required hay. She was amiable, kindly, but she never understood. At such times who could blame me if I went to the bull's stable when I saw her coming. Though the bull was the sweetest character on the ranch, she went in mortal terror of him. She would try to find me in the horse stable, but she would not come near El Toro for her very life. ”

“ And when I stayed outside the stock-yard and put up the slip panels and patted Beeswing on the neck the one great pleasure of the day was over. The rest was not to be accomplished in the dusk of dawn and under the morning star, but had to be wrought out in flying dust, amid the plague of flies and the fierce heat of an Austral noon, whose heat increased with the slow sun's decline. But that swift sweet hour of the morning had been my very own. ”

“ There is not an old shellback alive who has clung between angry heaven and the grey-green pastures of the deep but deserves a Victoria Cross for unconscious, dutiful, grumbling, growling valour. He might justly call every scanty dollar he earns a medal. For he has often fought in the Pacific, or by the Horn, or off the windy Cape. To recall the thick tempest at midnight, when the wind harps thunder on the stretched rigging, is to be a man again. ”

“ A SNOW-GRIND
Perhaps it is not wholly an advantage that most Alpine literature has been done by experts in climbing, by men who have climbed till climbing is second nature and they see Nature through their snow-goggles as something to be circumvented. That this is the attitude of most mountaineers is tolerably obvious. And though much that is good has been written about the Alps, and some that is, from some points of view, even surpassingly so, most of it is a proof that climbing is a deal easier than writing. ”

“ He turned and glared at me, demanding what I knew about mining. "Not a great deal," said I; "but I have seen mining here and in Australia, and for one that makes anything a hundred die dead broke." "Well," he replied, scornfully "I'd rather die that way than go ploughing, and I tell you I know where there is money to be made. Just wait till I can get hold of a capitalist."
That is another of the poor prospector's stock cries; but as a general rule capitalists are wary, and don't invest in such "wild cat" speculations. ”

“ London taught me a great deal that I could not learn in Australia, or on the sea, or in any Texas, or British Columbia. But I came to London with scaled eyes, and tasted other poverty than that I knew. Illusion is mostly foreshortening of time. One wants to prophesy and to see. The chief lesson here is that prophets must be blind. The end of the race is the racing thereof after all. To do a little useful work (even though the useful may be a thousandth part of the useless) is the end of living. The only illusion worth keeping is that anything can be useful. ”