Gifts of fortune, and hints for those about to travel

I

It was decided that someone must stand by the boat. There was an uncertainty about the tide, and there might be a need to moor her elsewhere. The other two members of the crew did not propose a gamble to decide which one of the three of us should stay with her while the other two went into the town. I was told off as watchman, at once and unanimously, and it was clear that in this the rest of the crew knew they were doing the orderly thing. Their decision was just. It was I who was to be left. It is the lot of the irresolute to get left, though sometimes the process is called the will of God. The boat, with me in it, was abandoned. The two of us had to make the most of each other for an indefinite time.

Perhaps the boat, being a boat of character and experience, had no confidence in her protector, because after a spell of perfect quietude, in which I thought she slept, without warning she began to butt the quay wall impatiently. She was irritably awake. But I was not going to begin by showing docile haste when a creature named Brunhilda demanded my attention so insistently. Instead, I leisurely filled my pipe and lit it, took half-a-dozen absent-minded draws at it, and then went forward idly and lengthened the mooring-line. The boat fell asleep again at once.

Our line was fast to a ring-bolt which possibly was in the old stonework of that quay wall when the ships which moored there were those that made of a voyage to America a new and grand adventure. That ring-bolt was rust, chiefly. Its colour was deep and rich. With the sun on it, the iron circle on its stem might have been a strange crimson sea-flower pendent from the rock over the tide. A precipitous flight of unequal steps ran from the top of the quay down its face to the water. The steps continued under the water, but I don’t know how far. They dissolved. Of the submerged steps I could not count below the sixth, and even the fourth and fifth were dim in a submarine twilight. The tread of the midway step, which was near my face and just below it, was uncertain whether it ought to be above water or sunk. Sometimes, when I looked that way, it was under a few inches of glass, but as I looked the glass would become fluid and pour noiselessly from it. Once when the glass covered it I noticed an olive-green crab was on the step, set there, as it were in crystal. When he darted sideways it seemed unnatural, and as if he were alive and free. It was when he moved that I began to suspect that many affairs, an incessant but silent business of life, were going on around me and under the boat.

The water was as still and clear as the air. It seemed but little denser. It was only the apparition of water. It was tinted so faint a beryl that I know when my fingers touched it only because it was cold, and the air was hot. When first I glanced overside it was like peering into nothing, or at least at something just substantial enough to embody shadows. So I enjoyed the boat, which was tangible. The bleached woodwork of the little craft had stored the sun’s heat. Perhaps, though, it was full of the heat of past summers, even of the tropics, and its curious smells were memories of many creeks and harbours. It had been a ship’s boat. In its time it may have been moored to mangrove roots. It had travelled far. I don’t know when I enjoyed a pipe so much. The water was talking to itself under the boat. We were sunk three fathoms below the top of the quay, out of sight of the world. I could see nothing living but a scattered area of sea-birds resting on the tide. One of the birds, detached from his fellows, a black-headed gull, was so close that the pencilled lines of his plumage were plain. He cocked an eye at me enquiringly. He came still closer, of his own will or through the will of the tide—there was no telling—and we stared frankly at each other; and I think I may believe he admitted me as a member of whatever society he knows. Not a word was said, nor a sign made, but something passed between us which gave everything a value unfamiliar but, I am confident, more nearly a right value. This made me uncertain as to what might happen next. I felt I was the discoverer of this place. It was doubtful whether it had ever been seen before. I had accidentally chanced upon its reality. As to those stone steps, I had been up and down them often enough in other years, but I had the feeling they were new to me this morning, that they turned to me another and an unsuspected aspect. It was in such a moment that I first saw the crab at my elbow, and when he darted sideways it was as if he were moved by a secret impulse outside himself, the same power which moved the gull towards me, and which pulled the water off the step.

I looked overside to see whether this power were visible, and what it was like. There were six feet of water between me and the wall, and its surface was in the shadow of the boat; but the sunlight, at the same time, passed under the keel of the boat, so between my craft and the wall I could see to a surprising illuminated depth. The steps that were submarine were hung with algæ; near the surface of the water their fronds were individual and bright, but they descended and faded into mystery and the half-seen. Some of the larger shapes far below, whatever they were, seemed to be in ambush under the boat, and what they were waiting for in a world so dim, removed, and strange, I preferred not to consider, on a fine day. Those lurking forms, which might have been nether darkness itself becoming arborescent wherever sunlight could sink down to it and touch its unfashioned murk into what was lifelike, were eternally patient and still, as confident as things may be which wait in the place where we are told all life began. Midway between the keel of the boat and that lower gloom a glittering little cloud was suspensory. Each atom of it in turn caught a glint of sunlight, and became for an instant an emerald point, a star in the fathoms. But I was not the first to detect that shoal of embryonic life. A pale arrow shot upwards from the shadows at the cloud, which instantly dispersed. That quick sand-eel missed his shot.

That cloud was alive; the water and the dark forest below were populated. The impulse which kept the water moving on and off the step—by now it was using another step for its play, for the tide was falling—continued to shoot flights of those silver arrows into the upper transparency. They flew out of the shadows into the light and were back again quicker than the eye could follow them; and as casually as though they had known this sort of thing for æons, the morsels of life suspended in the upper light parted and vanished, to let the arrows through; then, as by magic, the glittering morsels reformed their company in the same place. No number of darting arrows could destroy their faith in whatever original word they once had been and the quay wall a vitreous hemisphere, a foot across. It had a pattern of violent hieroglyphics in the centre of its body. Its rim was flexible, and in regular spasms it contracted and expanded, rolling the medusa along. The creature darkened as it rolled into the shadow of the boat. It sank under me and was suddenly illuminated, like a moon, as it entered the radiance beneath. It was while watching it that I noticed in the water some tinted gold.

There drifted into the space between the boat sparks which I was ready to believe came of the quality of the sea itself, for I could see the water was charged with a virtue of immense power. When the jellyfish had gone I watched one of those glims, for it was not doused at once, but merely changed its colour. It moved close to the boat. The sparkling came from a globe of pure crystal, which was poised in the current on two filaments. The scintillating globe, no larger than a robin’s egg, floated along in abandon in the world below my boat, sometimes bright in elfish emerald, and then changing to shimmering topaz. Scores of these tiny lamps were burning below, now that my eyes were opened and were sensible of them. They had been suddenly filled, I suppose, by the power which pulsed the algæ, which had turned the medusa into a bright planet, shot the arrows, opened my own intelligence, and given sentience to the other atoms of drifting life. The water was constellated with these little globes changing their hues, and I remembered then that Barbellion once said a ctenophore in sunlight was the most beautiful thing in the world....

There was a shout above me. The crew had returned. It demanded to know whether I was tired of waiting.

II

We pushed out the boat, and four oars shattered the mirror and the revelation. Above the quay the white houses appeared, mounting a quick incline in chalk-like strata. They did not reach the ridge of the hill. The ridge was a wood dark against a cloud. Downstream, at the end of the ridge, our river is met by another. They merge and turn to go to sea. They become a gulf of confused currents and shoals in an exposed region of sandy desert, salting, and marsh, which ends seaward in the usual form of a hooked pebble bank. Beyond the bank and the breakers is a bay enclosed by two great horns of rock, thirty miles apart. The next land westward, straight out between the headlands, is America. A white stalk of a lighthouse stands amid the dunes, forlorn and fragile in that bright wilderness, a lamp at our door for travellers.

But we went upstream. The tide here, however, penetrates into the very hills. The exposed coils of roots and the lower overhanging branches of oaks in precipitous valleys, which in aspect are remote from the coast, are submerged daily, and shelter marine crustacea; the fox-gloves and ferns are just above the crabs. Yet where we grounded our boat, six miles from the lighthouse, the western ocean was as distant a thought as Siberia. On this still midsummer afternoon our lonely creek was the conventional picture of the tropics, silent, vivid, and far. The creek—or pill, as the natives of the west country call it in their Anglo-Saxon—is, like all the best corners of the Estuary, uninhabited and unvisited. Perhaps the common notion of the tropics, a place of superb colours, with gracious palms, tree-ferns, and vines haunted by the birds of a milliner’s dream, originated in the stage scenery of the Girls from Ko-ko and other equatorial musical comedies, to which sailors have always given their hearty assent. That picture has seldom been denied. What traveller would have the heart to do it? The sons of Adam continue to hope that one day they may return to the garden, and it would be cruel to warn them that this garden cannot be entered through the Malay Straits or by the Amazon or Congo. We ought to be allowed, I think, to keep a few odd illusions in a world grown so inimical to idle dreaming. For the jungle in reality is rather like mid-ocean where there is no help. The sea is monstrously active, but the jungle is no less fearful because it is quiet and still. It is not variously coloured. It has few graces. Once within its green wall, that metallic and monotonous wall, the traveller becomes daunted by a foreboding gloom, and a silence older than the memories of Rheims and Canterbury. The picture is not of Paradise, but of eld and ruin. You see no flowers, and hear no nightingales. Sometimes there is a distant cry, prompted, it might be guessed, by one of the miseries which Dante witnessed in a similar place. Yet whatever beings use equatorial forests for their purgatory, they remain discreetly hidden; Dante there could but peer into the shadows and listen to the agony of creatures unknown. The grotesque shapes about him would mock him with aloof immobility, and Dante presently would go mad. He would never write a poem about his experiences. I saw this when reading Bates’ Naturalist again, while the crew of the Brunhilda gathered driftwood in a Devon creek to make a fire for tea. Bates does little to warn a reader that the forest of the Amazon is not a simple exaggeration of Jefferies Pageant of Summer. And what a book, I saw then, a man like Bates could have made of such a varied world as our Estuary. The range of life in this littoral, from the heather of the moors to the edge of the pelagic shelf where the continental mass of Europe drops to the abyss—a range, in places, of no more than ten miles—has not yet had its explorer and its chronicler. Yet I never saw in days of travel in the equatorial forest such hues and variety of form as were held in the vase formed by the steep sides of our little west-country combe. A cascade of rose, purple, yellow, white and green, was held narrowly by those converging slopes of bracken and oak scrub. That descent of colour was in movement, too, as a tumult would be, with the abrupt and ceaseless leaping and soaring of numberless red admiral, clouded yellow, peacock, fritillary and white butterflies. On the foreshore, where a tiny stream emerged from this silent riot, a cormorant on a pile was black and sentinel. Kingfishers passed occasionally, streaks of blue light. It was the picture of the tropics, as popularly imaged, but it was what travellers seldom see there.

III

If there is a better window in the world than my portlight in Burra I do not know it. I look out on space from that opening in the topworks of a village which at night is amid the stars and in daylight is at sea. My cubicle is shady, but the light outside may be bright enough to be startling when of a morning it wakes me. I sit up in bed, wondering whether our ship is safe. The portlight seems too high and bright. The eyes are dazzled by the very chariot-spokes of Apollo, and ocean can be heard beneath me, vast and sonorous. The senses shrink, for they feel exposed and in danger. But all is well. Our ship that is between the sky and the deep has weathered more than two thousand years, and no more has happened to it than another fine day. Burra has not run into the sun.

From my bed to-day the first thing I saw was a meteor flaming alongside us. But my window kept pace with it. The speed of the streaming meteor was terrific, but it could not pass us. Soon the meteor was resolved into the gilded vane of a topmast; I understood that a strange ship had come in. Nothing but time was passing my window. Yet still I had no doubt that the light in the east beyond the ship’s vane, ascending splendid terraces of cloud to a choir which, if empty, was so monitory that one felt trivial and unprepared beneath it for any announcement by an awful clarion, was a light to test the worth of a dark and ancient craft like Burra. I listened for sounds of my fellow-travellers. They were silent. There was an ominous quiet, as if I were the first to know of this new day.

Then I just heard some subdued talk below, and the sounds of a boat moving away. As the speakers drew apart they called aloud. Yeo was off to fish by the Middle Ridge. The shipyard began its monody. One hears the shipyard only when its work begins. That means we are all awake. Those distant mallets continue in a level, confident chant, the recognised voice of our village. But by the time breakfast is over the fact that Burra is still building ships is no more remarkable than the other features of the Estuary; the ears forget the sound. Only if it ceased should we know that anything was wrong. For a minute or two no doubt we should wonder what part of our life had stopped. But the hammering has not ceased here since the first galley was built, which was before even the Danes began to raid us. The Danes found here, we have been told, seafarers as stout as themselves, with ships as good as their own, and got the lesson that, if quiet folk always acted with such fierce promptitude and resolution when interfered with, then this would be an unlucky world for pirates.

Yet have no fear. I am not going to write a history of Burra. There was a time when I would have begun that history with no more dubiety than would a man an exposition of true morality. But the more we learn of a place the less is our confidence in what we know of it. We understand at last that the very stones mock our knowledge. They have been there much longer. I do feel fairly certain, however, that absolute truth is not at the bottom of any particular well of ours. This village, which stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about it to-day is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out from my portlight to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may be something in that old legend of a great stone ship on an endless voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before, so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a celestial voyage, and God knows where. So I dare not assume that I have the knowledge to write up the log-book of Burra. I should very much like to meet the man who could do it. We certainly have a latitude and longitude for the aid of commercial travellers and navigators who want our address, and it is clear that they too, as they seem able to find us so easily, must be keeping pace with us; that they are on the same journey as ourselves to the same distant and unknown star; but when one night I ventured to hint this surmise, as a joke, to an experienced sailor who came in for a pipe with me, he said he had never heard of that particular star; all the stars he knew were named. He said it was easy for him to lay a course for Burra, anyhow, and to keep it, just by dead reckoning. Besides—he pointed out—how could a man learn his whereabouts from a star he didn’t know and couldn’t see? Yes; how could he? But it is no joke. That old mariner had never heard of the perilous bark which some men have to keep pumped watertight, and to steer in seas beyond all soundings by a star whose right ascension can be judged only by inference, and by faith that is sometimes as curiously deflected as is any compass.

When taking bearings from my window, merely to get the time of day, I can see the edge of the quay below and a short length of it. That gives promise enough that Burra is of stout substance, and rides well. A landing-stage, a sort of stone gangway, is immediately under the window. Whoever comes aboard or leaves us, I can see them. At low tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach where ketches and schooners rest on their bilges, their masts at all angles. Corroded anchors and chains lie littered about. In summer-time I smell tar and marine dissolution. Morning and those stairs connect us with the fine things that the important people are doing everywhere. Open boats with lug sails bring gossips and the news from the other side of the water, and on market-day bring farmers and their wives with baskets of eggs, chickens, butter, and vegetables, and perhaps a party of tourists to gaze at us curiously and sometimes with disparagement. Few objects look so pleasant as a market-basket nearly full of apples, and with some eggs on top. Yet it is well to admit, and here I do it, that there are visitors who call Burra a dull and dirty little hole.

Indeed, there is no telling how even my window in Burra will take a man. Once I brought a friend to sit with me, so that he could watch the ferry and the boats, the dunes on the far sides, and the clouds. I thought, with him as look-out astern, he could tell me when a ship came down river, and I could warn him when I saw a vessel appear at the headland (out of nowhere, apparently), and stand in for the anchorage. What more could he want? But he said the place was dead. He complained that nothing happened there.

I don’t know what he wanted to happen there. It gives me enough to think about. I always feel that plenty is happening to me as I watch those open boats. When a Greek vase is the equal of one of them in grace it is the treasure of a national museum. But our men can build such craft in their spare hours. The human mind, confused still and thick with the dregs of the original mud, has clarified itself to that extent. It would not be easy to prove that man has made anything more beautiful than one of our boats. Its lines are as delicate and taut as a dove’s. It is quick and strong, and it is so poised that it will change, when going about, as though taken by a sudden temerarious thought; and then in confidence it will lift and undulate on a new flight. The balance and proportions of its body accord with all one desires greatly to express, but cannot. In that it is something like music. The deep satisfaction to be got from watching a huddle of these common craft, vivacious but with wings folded, and tethered by their heads to the landing-stairs, each as though eagerly looking for the man it knows, will send me to sleep in a profound assurance that all is well. For they seem proper in that world beyond my window, where there is the light and space of freedom. The tide is bright with its own virtue. The range of sandhills across the Estuary is not land, nothing that could be called soil, but is a promise, faint but golden, far in the future. You know that some day you will land there. But there is plenty of time for that. There is no need to hurry. It is certain the promise is for you. One may sleep.

After dark, like a fabulous creature, Burra vanishes. There is little here then, except an occasional and melancholy sound. I have for companionship at the window at night only a delicate star-cluster, low in the sky, which is another village on the opposite shore. Maybe Burra too, is a star-cluster, when seen from the other stars, and from that distance perhaps appears so delicate as to make its indomitable twinkling wonderful on a windy night. There are a few yellow panes here after sunset, and they project beams across the quay, one to make a hovering ghost of a ship’s figure-head, and another to create a lonely bollard—the last relic of the quay—and another to touch a tiny patch of water which is lively, but never flows away, perhaps because the Estuary has vanished and it has nowhere to go. It prefers to stay in the security of the beam till morning.

Now it is curious, but after dark, when our place has disappeared except for such chance fragments, and when to others we can be but a few unrelated glints among the other stars, that Burra is most populous, warm, and intimate. I see it then for what it is, a vantage for a few of us who know each other, and who are isolated but feel secure in the unseen and hitherto untravelled region of space where the sun has abandoned us. All around us is bottomless night. Our nearest neighbour is another constellation.

IV

I have learned at Burra that we townsfolk know nothing of the heavens. There are only wet days in the city, and fine. The clouds merely pass over London. They cross the street, and are gone. They cast shadows on us, they make the place dark, they suggest, with a chill, that there are powers beyond our borders over which even the elders of the city have no jurisdiction. The day is fine again and we forget our premonition; it was only the weather.

The motor-buses are all numbered and their routes are known, but the clouds are visitations, unannounced and inexplicable; warnings, which we disregard, that in truth we do not know where our city is. We cannot distinguish one cloud from another, because the narrow measure of heaven for each street allows us but an arc of a celestial coast, or one summit of a white range; before that high continent has more than suggested its magnitude we see the bus we want, or go down a side-turning.

Doubtless the meagre outlook of this imprisonment from the heavens must have its effect upon us. Our eyes go no more to the sky than they do to the hills. We have acquired, if we have not inherited, the characteristic of downcast eyes. Where there is no horizon there may be work, but no hope, and so we begin to see the way to account for the cynical humour of the Cockney. We say, in friendly derision, that they who look upwards more than can be justified by the rules of our busy community are star-gazers. When we look up, it is not to the hills, but to a post-office clock or the name of a street. The city has length and breadth, but no height, for the greater the elevation of its buildings, the lower its inhabitants sink.

But in this Estuary I have changed that view of the world for one that is flooded with light. The earth, I can see, is a planet, a vast reflector. We look up and out from Burra, in the morning, to learn what is stored in the sky; and if there is a moon we look to the heavens at night to judge how the men at sea will fare, while we sleep. For the clouds here plainly rule our affairs; or they are the heralds of the powers which rule us. The clouds take the light of the sun, and translate it into the character of our luck. On a bright morning over this bay, when the happy and careless imagine that all is well, the wind will begin to back. We are not at once aware of the reason for it, but the colours fade from the earth and from one’s spirit. The light dims. The uplands, which had been of umber and purple, become that shadow of desolation from which men seek refuge. Scud like gusts of livid smoke blows in swiftly from the southwest over the hills. The clouds which follow it are dark and heavy, and so low that they take the ground, roll over and burst. The uplands vanish. The sea grows bleak and forbidding, and the cliffs, with their crags and screes, turn into a prospect of downfall and ruin.

Yet when the wind is easterly, then the polish of the bay is hardly tarnished, the clouds are high and diaphanous veils, and there is no horizon, for sea and sky are merged as one concavity of turquoise. When the morning is of easterly weather and still, the sea floor about the boat is distinct in several fathoms, and the mind floats so buoyantly and confidently midway in space that it feels there is no human problem which could not be solved by a happy thought.

One afternoon the wind had been cool, for it came from the north of north-west; then, long before its hour, the sun vanished behind a veil. The wind fell with the sun. The world was without a movement, except for the languid and distant glinting of the breakers on the bar. The sea had the burnish of dull metal. The distant headlands were but faint outlines, and they might have been poised aloft, for there was as much light under them as above them. A steamer was passing from one headland to another, but whether it was sailing the heavens to another planet, or was going to America, it was hard to say. There were no clouds. There was only a vague light which was both sea and sky. In this indeterminate west, where the sun would then have been setting, was a group of small islands of pearl, not marked on the chart, where no islands ought to have been seen. They were too lofty and softly luminous to be of this earth; they floated in a threatening cobalt darkness. The day was a discernible presence, but it was ghostly; and I wish I could guess its origin, and why it stood over us, pale and silent, while we waited fearfully for a word that did not come.

V

On the shore of the dunes, which are across the Estuary from Burra, few boats ever ground. There are shoals, and a conflict of tides and currents, and then the surf. And why should a boat put over? Nothing is there but the lighthouse and the sand. Nor is it easy to approach it from the habitable land to the east, for after a long and devious journey by ferry and road to avoid the arm of the sea, you come first to a difficulty of marsh and dyke, and then to the region of the dunes. That journey takes all the best of the daylight, for you could not hurry if you knew every yard of the way, which nobody does; and then, once caught in the brightness and silence of the desert of sandhills, the need to hurry is forgotten.

It is one of the days with a better light when your boat grounds on that shore. You may begin to walk the beach along the firm wet sand by the breakers, but you cannot keep to it. Something which calls, some strange lump among the flotsam stranded on the upper beach, draws you towards the sandhills. It looked, you imagined, like a man asleep, with a dark blanket over him; but it proved to be only a short length of a ship’s spar covered with bladder-wrack. There is no returning then. Once you reach that line of rubbish it is the track you follow, the message you try to read. A baffling story, though, made of words from many stories, separated, partly erased, muddled by the interruption of storms, and woven irrelevantly into one long serpentining sentence which extends to the point where the shore goes round a corner; and from there, when you reach that point, continues to the next. It is made of shells, derelict trees, bushes which have drifted from shores only a botanist could guess, boards and fragments of wrecks, yarn and rope, bottles, feathers, carapaces of crabs and sea-urchins, and corks, all tangled with pulse into an interminable cable. Sometimes it runs through the black ribs of an old wreck.

Perhaps, after the seaweed, there are more corks in its composition than anything else. The abundance of corks on this desert shore, for they are to be found at the head of every miniature combe of the sandhills, most of them old and bleached, but some so fresh that it is easy to read the impress of the vintners on their seals, suggests that man’s most marked characteristic is thirst. If one went by the evidence on this beach, then thirst is the chief human attribute. In this life we might be occupied most of the time in drinking from bottles. Examples of the bottles are here, too. The archæologists of the future will find our enduring bottles and corks in association, and they will discover, by experiment, that the corks often fit the bottles, and they will deduce that both were used, in all probability, in conjunction. But for what reason? Nothing will have been left in the bottles for the archæologists but dirt. We occasionally look on to-day while a learned man, from fragmentary evidence, creates a surprising picture of the past. I feel I should enjoy coming back, several thousand years hence, to hear another learned creature, a table before him covered with the shards and corks of our years—one almost perfect example has the mysterious word BOLS cast on it—explain to his fascinated audience what he feels sure, from the relics before him, on which he has spent the best years of his life, the mysterious folk of our own age were like.

We can be fairly sure not much evidence of our own age will remain by then. What will survive us will be the oddest assortment of rubbish; but the pertinacious corks will be there. The British Museum will have gone. It will be impossible to refer to the London Directory. No Burke will exist. All the files of our newspapers, with their lists of honours, will have perished. What will our age be called? Not the Age of Invention, of the Great War, of Reconstruction, or anything else that is noble and inspiriting; for not a vestige of a democratic press, an aeroplane, a motor-car, or a wireless set will remain. There will be only corks and bottles.

“For the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....” Yet it does seem unfair that of all the proud memories of these resounding days, nothing may persist but our corks and bottles. Another interruption of ice may creep down from the Pole, as has happened before; as indeed happened once to the undoing of a previous race of men. Its rigours increase, but so gradually that men are hardly aware that anything is happening. They say to each other at last, “The summers seem very short.” The cheerful Press of that day, true to its function of maintaining the spirit of the people, never mentions Winter, never speaks of the cold, but always turns its pages to the south, where most of the sun is.

Nevertheless that does not thaw the ice. It still creeps south. The habit of a week-end at a cottage is presently forgotten. Unalienable rights and privileges become buried under inexorable glaciers that know nothing of our sounder economic arguments. And, in the end, maybe the ball of St. Paul’s is dropped as an erratic block from the bottom of an iceberg to form a fossil in the ooze of a southern sea, to puzzle we may not guess what earnest investigator living in an ameliorated clime and time.

That ice retreats again, and the haunts and works of our age are exposed, as were those of Magdalenian man. And what have we been able to guess about him? Very little; but he did, we are sure, use implements having enduring parts of flint and bone. It is fairly certain that if he were aware that we judged him by his flints, he would be a little grieved. And it would be too bad if the trifles, which our butlers discarded with a flourish during our dinners were all that survived for the future to see of us. Why, that archaeologist of a time to come may not even deduce that we employed butlers.

VI

The rain had ceased, but the quay of Burra offered no other benefit. I was down there before dawn. Morning had not come, but I suppose the downpour had washed some of the dark out of the night, for all the quay was plain. It was not the quay I knew, but its wan spirit; and the vessels moored to it were ghosts, the faint impress of dead ships on a world that now just retained a memory of them. There was no sound. There were only phantoms in a pallor. Perhaps it had ceased to rain because rain would be too substantial for a bodyless world. The irregular pools on the quay were not water, but descents to the profound. Rain would at once enlarge them till the quay dissolved and became as the Estuary, and as the sky, for both sea and sky were nothing. They were the depth of the future, in which were hints of what some day might see the sun.

I felt I ought not to be there. There was no telling whether I was too soon or too late, whether I was the first man, or the last. I doubted that hush, and that dim appearance about me. When the air did stir, it was as if it were the breath of death, and the earth were the body of death. Then I made up my mind. It was no use going to sea, as I had intended. I would go back to bed. At that moment there were footsteps, and the quay at once became solid. Two black figures approached, the size of men. One of them put his foot into a great hole in the quay, and he did not vanish instantly, but made a splash and an exclamation. That voice certainly was something I knew. The other man laughed quietly, the familiar satiric comment which comes of resignation to fate. We were all going to sea, as far as the Foreland.

That cape is the western horn to the bay, and nobody goes there, except sailors who die because they see the loom of it, or hear its warning, too late. The Foreland to the people of Burra is like the clouds. It is part of their own place, but it is unapproachable. At times it is missing. In some winds it will evaporate; though usually at sunset it shapes again, high, black, and fantastic, the end of the land to the west, and as distant and sombre as the world of the sagas. Is it likely, then, that one would ever think of a voyage to it? That cape, which one sees either because the light is at the right incidence, or because one is dreaming, might be no more than a thought turned backward to vague antiquity; to Ultima Thule, where the sun never rises now, but where it is always evening twilight. It would have no trees. It would be a desolation of granitic crags, mossed and lichened, and the seas below would be sounding doom, knowing that even the old gods were dead. It was not likely that we could credit such a voyage; yet the truth is we had assembled for it, and because of a promise made carelessly with an ancient mariner in a tavern on the previous afternoon. What, on such a morning, and in such a place, was such a promise? As intangible as was our quay when I first saw it that morning, and no more matter than the Foreland itself, which is always distant, and then is gone.

Yet here we were. We had met before dawn, for that very voyage, because of an indifferent word spoken yesterday. The bar, too, would have to be crossed. The bar! Besides, we were getting most unreasonably hungry, and so could not smoke; and this induced the early morning temper, which is vile, and would be worse than the early morning courage but for the fact that that sort of courage is unknown in man, never rising to more than a bleak and miserable fortitude.

Charon hailed us from below the quay. He had with him a nondescript attendant. We embarked for his craft, which he said was anchored in midstream. We recognised him as our sailor of yesterday, though now there was something glum and ominous about him. He had no other word for us, but rowed steadily, and looked down his beard. His bark was like himself, when, still in resignation to what we had asked for, we boarded her. She was flush-decked, her freeboard was about eighteen inches, she had no bulwarks—to tell the truth, she was but a very barge, with that look of stricken poverty which is the sure mark of the usefulness of the merely industrious. She would float, I guessed, if not kept too long in seas that washed her imperfect hatch-covers. She would sail her distance, if the wind did not force her over till the water reached the rent in her deck. She could carry thirty tons of stone; and, in fair weather, with reckless men, thirty-five tons. She had a freeboard, I repeat, of one foot six inches, now she was light, and peering through the interstices of her hatch-boards I could see her kelson, and note that though she did not leak like a basket she was doing her best. We were going to the Foreland to gather stones for the ballast of ships. Absurd and desperate enterprise! We could hear faint moaning, when attentive. That was the voice of the bar, three miles away.

The skipper and his man hoisted the mainsail, and we three manned the windlass, working in link by link a cable without end, till we were automata going up and down indifferent to both this life and the life to come. The barge gave a little leap as the anchor cleared.

The foresail was set. We drifted sideways round the hill. The silent houses, with white faces, looked at us one by one. We found a little wind, and the barge walked off past the lighthouse, which still was winking at us. There came a weighty gust; the gear shook and banged, but held taut. Off she went.

Burra was behind us. Before us was a morose grey void. The bay apparently was only space, uncreated, unlighted; though in the neighbourhood of our barge we noticed there was the beginning of form in that dim and neutral world. Long leaden mounds of water out of nowhere moved inwards past us, slow and heavy, lifting the barge and dropping her into hollows where her sails shook, and spilled their draught. We three grasped stays, and peered outwards into the icy vacancy, wondering whether this was the free life, whether we were enjoying it, whether we wanted to go to the Foreland, and how long this would last. In the east there formed a low stratum of gold. Some of the leaden mounds were now burnished, or they glinted with precious ore. When the light broadened the air seemed to grow colder, as though day had sharpened the arrows of the wind.

The hollow murmur from the bar increased to an intermittent plunging roar, and presently we fell into that noise. The smother stood the barge up, and stood her down, and drenched the mainsail to the peak. But it was only in play. We were worth nothing worse. We were allowed to go by, and one of us pumped the wash out of her, for the play had been somewhat rough.

In the long swell of the bay our movements became rhythmic, and we settled down quietly in a long reach. A vault of blue had shaped over us. The Foreland was born into the world. It looked towards the new day, and was of amber; but over the moors to the north-east the rain-clouds, a gathering of sullen battalions, challenged the dawn with an entrenched region of gloom. Yet when the sun arose and looked straight at them, they went. It was a good morning. Now we could see all the bay, coloured and defined in every hanging field, steep, and combe. The waters danced. The head of the skipper appeared at the scuttle—only one at a time could get into our cabin—and he had a large communal basin of tea, and a loaf speared on a long knife.

The Foreland, to which for hours our work seemed to bring us no nearer, which had been mocking the efforts to approach it of an obstinate little ship with a crew too stupid to realise that efforts to reach an enchanted coast were futile, suddenly relented. It grew higher and tangible. At last we felt that it was drawing us, rather too intimately, towards its overshadowing eminence. The nearer it got, the greater grew my surprise that in a time long past man had found the heart to put off in a galley, to leave what he knew, and to stand in to an unknown shore, if it offered no more than our cape. The apparition of the Foreland was as chill as the shadow in the soul of man. It appeared to have some affinity with that shadow. Though monstrous and towering, it seemed buoyant and without gravity, an image of original and sombre doubt. Above our mast, when I looked up, earthquakes and landslides were impending, arrested in collapse. But I thought they were quivering, as though the arrest were momentary. That vast mass seemed based on rumblings, shouts, and hollow shadows. Our craft still moved in, projected forward on vehement billows, past black jags in blusters of foam, and then anchored with calamity suspended above. Our ship heaved and fell on submarine displacements. The skipper and his man went below.

When they reappeared they were naked. It was a good and even necessary hint. We got into the boat, and pulled towards a beach which was a narrow shelf at the base of a drenched wall. The rocks which flanked that little beach were festooned with weeds, and sea growths hung like curtains before the night of caves. Somehow there the water was stilled, and all but one of us leaped into it. One man remained in the boat.

The ocean was exploding on steeples and tables of rock. It formed domes green and shining over submerged crags. The midday sun gave the foam the brilliance of an unearthly light. The shore looked timeless, but it smelt young. The sun was new in heaven.

And what were those ivory figures leaping and shouting in the surf? As I watched them in that light a doubt shook me. I began to wonder whether I knew that little ship, and those laughing figures, and that sea. Who were they? Where was it? When was it?

THE END