The learned literary critics may be as wise as they please, but there is no undoing the early circumstances which have made some names in literature of significance to us, and have put other names, perhaps even greater, forever in the dark. Our literary predilections were cast at our birth. So much depends, too, on where we heard a name first, and what was about the book when we read it. That is the reason why my correspondent’s letter is not irrelevant here, for it caught me out. It gave away the game. It showed me that I could never be a critic of letters. When his complaint came to me, some books for review were beside me. But what was I doing? Sitting in the shade, looking absently at a dazzling summer afternoon just beyond the chair, for I had just read with close attention this fragment in English:

Then there followed, for over three hundred closely printed pages, references to many outlandish names, probably occult, such as Busu Busu (“good drinking water may be obtained from a spring at the foot of the hill behind the missionary’s house”), Berri Berri Road, Rau Strait (“it has not been surveyed and is dangerous”), Tanjong Salawai, Pulo Gunong Api (I know enough to say that that means the island of the mountain of fire), Gisi and Pakal, Ceram Laut (“is high and hilly, and had on it, in 1898, a remarkable tree, 428 feet over the sea, which makes a good mark”), Suruake of the Goram Islands (“the inhabitants are quarrelsome and warlike ... anchorage off Wiseleat village, on the north side, in 24 fathoms, at over one mile from the shore and 130 yards from the steep to reef, with a hawser to the latter to prevent driving”). I had been idling with that book, with the work of the latest enterprising novelists waiting beside me for my immediate attention, all the morning, and still could not let it go. Then came the querulous letter pointing out my indifference to the English literature of the 18th century; which in one respect was unjust, for if once I got going on Gulliver I might soon be in prison for sedition. Yet the rebuke was well merited. I would sooner read any volume of Directions for Pilots than the Latin poets. (And I should like to ask whether Ceram Laut has not been sighted since 1898). On the whole, I would much rather sit in a cabin of a ship which had just made fast again, and listen to the men who had brought her home, than read the best modern fiction. I should feel nearer to the centre of life. Never mind the name of the book which had made that a finer day for me. You will not find it in the circulating libraries; but it has an official rote, initialled, and is guaranteed by the Hydrographic Office, Admiralty; so there must be something in it. The volume, in fact, is mysterious only in the queer effect it has upon me. I dare not commend it for general reading, but I myself would sooner peruse it than the essays of Addison because I get more out of it. I should like to describe, in some detail, the place where I bought it, the man who sold it to me, what he said about it, and the seclusions of the Java and Arafura Seas where, far from all contact with English literature, I afterwards examined it. One sunrise, by the aid of this very book, I knew what I saw ahead on the horizon was Pulo Gunong Api.

VII

Someone stumbled down the bridge ladder for which I was making. I could see nothing, but I heard the voice of the chief mate. He was annoyed with himself. Since nightfall our steamer had been without body, except the place where one stood. With a steady look it was just possible to find faith in the substance of the alleyway where the two of us paused to gossip, for its white paint might have been the adherence to the ship of the faintest trace of the day which had gone. Somewhere ahead of us a promontory of Africa reached almost to our course. Our course was laid just to miss it. We were keeping watch for its light. But if the void at the world’s end had been under our prow we should not have known it. It was a dark night. An iron door in the alleyway clanged open with an explosion of light. The light projected solidly overside, with an Arab fireman brightly encased in it, who was emptying sacks of ash.

Before daybreak the roar of our cable woke me. When I peered through the cabin port I thought we had anchored in the midst of a cluster of stars. That was Oran. I should see Africa in the morning. When we left Barry Dock with coal the weather was like the punishment for sin; but tomorrow we should see a white town in the sun, the descendants of the Salee rovers, and Africa—Africa for the first time.

Those first impressions! Quite often our first impression of a place is also our last, and it depends solely upon the weather and the food. This is not doing justice to the world. We shall never learn enough to do justice to our world unless there is something in this talk of transmigration and metamorphosis. I might, for instance, have written down Oran as a mere continuation of the coast of Wales, because next morning the captain and I landed at a jetty, wearing oilskins. This was Africa’s coral strand—how quaint it is, the way the romantic use the facts!—and the grandchildren of the Sallee rovers were carrying coal in baskets, from which black liquid poured down their bodies. To judge by their appearance of bowed and complete submission, every drop of pirate blood had been washed out of them long ago.

There might have been mountains behind the town, though it was hard to see them. Something seemed to be there, but it was thin and smeared. Africa, so far as I could see it that morning, was the office of a shipping agent, where we gossiped of steamers and men we knew, looked at maps on the walls, and wondered what the agent’s fading photographs represented. Then we caught an electric tram, which took us to an hotel in a French town, a town well-ordered and righteously commercial, and garrisoned by French soldiers in cherry-colored bloomers; for this was years ago. The bedroom had a tiled floor, but no fireplace, because the house was built on the theory that we were in Africa, and by getting under a red bale of eiderdown one managed to keep from perishing.

Well, Oran chose to show itself the next morning. You could see then that Wales was very far to the north. Winter, perhaps, had found out in the night that it was in the wrong place. It had gone home. It was not worth while returning to the ship, so I stayed ashore.

The best moments of a traveller are not likely to be divined from the list of the ship’s ports of call. They are inconsequential. It is no good looking for them. They do not seem to be native to any particular spot on earth. They have no relation to the chart. It is impossible to define every one of their elements, and, worse luck, they are not rewards for endurance and patience. You do not go to them. They surprise you as you pass. Nor should they serve as material for travel narrative unless you would make your report delusive, for they have no geographical bearings. Nobody is likely to find them again. It is no good talking about them. Yet without them travel would be worse than the job of the urban dust collector. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and there is no telling how and in what place the happy incidence of light and understanding will come.

Last summer, when walking through a sunken Dorsetshire lane, there was the ghost of an odour I knew, though I could not name it; and at that moment I began to think of a man I met in France early in the war. I climbed the bank to see what was growing above. Bean flowers! Any survivor of the First Hundred Thousand will remember that odour while he lives. The memory of Hesketh Prichard and the smell of bean flowers make for me the same apparition: the white bones of Ypres in the first June of it. Smell is likely to have much to do with a first impression. The Somme battleground, once you were under its threat, I think, was raw marl and smoking rubbish. It doesn’t do, to-day, to walk unexpectedly into the whiff of a place where old rubbish is mouldering in a field on a moist day, not if you are with friends; they may think you are mad; they would not be far wrong, either.

Yes, smell has a lot to do with it. It recalls what the eye registered, put away, and forgot. I shall never forget my first voyage, not while steam tractors are allowed to poison and destroy the streets of London. The gust of hot grease from one of them, as it thunders past, pictures for me what could be seen of the North Sea (December, too!) from the companion hatch of a trawler; a world black and ghast upset out of the sunrise and running down to founder us. The breath of the engine-room puffed up the hatch as she rolled. She had an over-heated bearing somewhere, for the engines had been racing all night; it had been one of those nights at sea. The coaming of the hatch was wet and cold, and the hard wind tasted of iron and salt. The steward was knocking about the coffee cups at the foot of the ladder; but I did not want any. For some unreasonable cause now I do not object to the greasy smell and thunder of steam tractors.

VIII

There should be no itinerary but the course of things. The plan of a journey is made to be broken. Only famous travellers who make daring flights by air to remote coasts to provide aeroplane builders, or manufacturers of synthetic nourishment, with bold advertisements, ever dare to say when we may watch for their return. Let us never challenge the gods, who do not exist, as to-day we all know, yet who may grow peevish if we not only deny their existence, but behave with arrogance, as though to show them that superior man has taken their place.

Reason was only given to us that we might comfort ourselves with it. I remember the smoke-room of a steamer, which was almost deserted, for it was near midnight. Three fellow passengers sat near me, and they were estimating the hour of our arrival in the morning. Their discourse was leisurely and casual, but they were confident; they knew; and with the elaborate and solid worth of that saloon to accommodate even our tobacco smoke, what doubt could there be about human judgments? As to our arrival, we could tell you within about fifteen minutes. I think my fellow-travellers were men of commerce, for they were familiar with the habits of our line and of many other lines; they could judge the hour when we should be home; and they were assured that to relieve humankind of poverty and war would be to invite God’s punishment for unfaithfulness. Then they emptied their glasses and left the place to me and a huge American negro pugilist, who had a fur-lined overcoat and many diamonds, and who spoke to the steward as a gruff man would to a dog.

Our steamer gave the assurance of that astronomical certitude which is inherent in great and impersonal affairs. She held on immensely and with celerity. Sometimes, when one of the screws came out of the water, a loose metal ash-tray on the table forgot itself, became alive and danced, like an escape of the amusement felt by the ship over some secret knowledge she had; hilarity she at once suppressed. The ash-tray became still and apparently ashamed of what it had done. The slow rolling of the steamer was only the maintenance of her poise in a wonderful speed. If your head leaned against the woodwork you could hear the profound murmuring of her energy. We were doing well. No doubt the men who had just gone out were right—at least, about the time of our arrival.

Outside, the promenade deck was vacant. Most of its lights were out. The portal to the room which accommodated our tobacco pipes announced itself to the darkness with a bright red bulb and black lettering. There was an infinity of night. One could not see far into it, but it poured over us in an unending flood. The red bulb seemed rather small after all. There was no sea. There was only an occasional sound and an illusion of fleeting spectres. Going down the muffled stairway to my cabin I met my steward. He warned me that we should be in by seven o’clock. The corridor below was silent, its doors all shut, and another steward was at the end of the empty lane, contemplative, reposeful, the unnecessary watchman of a secure city. The accustomed sounds of the ship, far away and subdued, were the earnest of an inevitable routine and predestination. Almost home now! I switched off the light; began planning the morrow into a well-earned holiday.... And then someone was shaking me with insistence. It was only the steward. The electric light was bright in my eyes.

“Not six yet, surely?”

“Not quite four, sir. But there’s not enough water for her to get in. Better get up now. A tug is expected.”

Here we were then. The engines had done their work. They had stopped. Though it was so early, I could hear people constantly passing along the corridor, and not with their usual leisure. Fussy folk! Plenty of time to shave and put things away! No need to hurry when this was the end of it.

On deck it was still dark. Nothing could be heard but the running of the tide along the body of our stationary ship. The note of the water was pitched curiously high. It was something like the sound of a tide running out quickly over shallows. An officer hurried through a loose group of passengers, politely disengaging himself from their inquiries, and vanished into the darkness of the after-deck. There were only a few lights. They seemed to be irrelevant. Only odd fragments of the ship could be seen. She was but a lump, and was doing nothing, and her people wandered about her busily but without aim. I could hear an officer’s voice loudly directing some business by the poop; there was that sound, and the thin hissing of a steam-pipe.

A big man in an ulster, whom I recognised as one of the fellows who, the night before, had decided at what hour we should arrive, began telling me rapidly how necessary it was for him to catch some train “absolutely without fail.” I think he said he had an important engagement. I was not listening to him very intently. The ship was aground.

But he did not appear to know it. Like the other passengers, he moved to and fro, all ready to start for home, within a few paces of his suit-case. These people waited in confident groups for the tender, guarding their possessions. Some of them were annoyed because the tender was dilatory.

There was no sign of any tender. Beyond us was only the murmuring of the running waters, and the darkness. Through the night a distant sea-lamp stared at us so intently that it winked but once a minute. Its eye slowly closed then, as if tired, but at once became fixed and intent again.

I was leaning over the port side, and the port side was leaning, too. She had a decided list. A seaman came near me and dropped the lead overside. He gave the result to someone behind me, and I turned. Two fathoms! The mate grinned and left us.

The darkness, as we waited for the tender which did not come, was thinned gradually by light from nowhere. I could now see the creature with one yellow eye. It was a skeleton standing in the sea on many legs. Some leaden clouds formed on the roof of night. The waters expanded. Low in the east, where the dawn was a pale streak, as if day had got a bright wedge into the bulk of chaos, was the minute black serration of a town. The guardian lamp at sea grew longer legs as the water fell, and when at last the sun looked at us the skeleton was standing on wide yellow sands. The ship was heeling over considerably now, for she was on the edge of the sands; the engineers put over a ladder and went to look at the propellers.

It was hours past the time of our arrival. There was no tender. There was no water. The distant town was indifferent. It made no sign. Perhaps it did not know we were there. The lady passengers, careless of their appearance, slept in deck chairs, grey and unkempt. The man who had to be in London before noon “without fail” was also asleep, and his children were playing about a coil of rope with a kitten.

IX

My first attempt to read at sea was a dreary failure. Yet how I desired a way to salvation. We were over the Dogger Bank. It was mid-winter. It was my first experience of deep water. A sailor would not call fifteen fathoms deep water; I know that now; yet if you suppose the North Sea is not the real thing when your ship is a trawler, and the time is Christmas, then do not go to find out. Do not look for the pleasure of travel in that form.

That morning, hanging to the guide rope of a perpendicular ladder, and twice thrown off to dangle free in a ship which seemed to be turning over, I mounted to watch the coming of the sun. It was a moment of stark revelation, and I was shocked by it. I could see I was alone with my planet. We faced each other. The size of my own globe—the coldness of its grandeur—the ease with which swinging shadows lifted us out of a lower twilight to glimpse the dawn, an arc of sun across whose bright face black shapes were moving, and then plunged us into gloom again—its daunting indifference! Where was God? No friend was there. There were ourselves and luck. That night a great gale blew.

So I tried Omar Khayyam, which was an act of folly. I could not resign myself even to the ship’s Bible, the only other book aboard. Printed matter is unnecessary when life is acutely conscious of itself, and is aware, without the nudge of poetry, of its fragility and briefness. I tried to read the Christmas number of a magazine, but that was worse than noughts and crosses. “You come into the wheel-house,” said the mate, “and stand the middle watch with me. It’s all right when you face it.” In the still seclusion of the wheel-house after midnight, where the sharpest sound was the occasional abrupt clatter of the rudder chains in their pipes, where the loosened stars shot across the windows and back again, where the faint glow of the binnacle lamp showed, for me, but my companion’s priestly face, and where chaos occasionally hissed and crashed on our walls, I found what books could not give me. The mate sometimes mumbled, or put his face close to the glass to peer ahead. They had a youngster one voyage, he told me, who was put aboard another trawler going home. The youngster was ill. That night it blew like hell out of the north-west. In the morning, so the hands advised the mate, “the youngster’s bunk had been slept in, so they said the other trawler would never get to port, and she didn’t.” I listened to the mate, and the sweep of the waves. The ship trembled when we were struck. But it seemed to me that all was well, though I don’t know why. What has reason to do with it? Is the sea rational?

After that voyage there were others, and sometimes a desert of time to give to books. Yet if to-night we were crossing the Bay, going out, and she was a wet ship, I should have a dim reminder of the sensations of my first voyage, and much prefer the voice of a shipmate to a book. The books then would not be out of the trunk. They would do well where they were, for a time. The first week, uncertain and strange, the ship unfamiliar and not at all like the good ships you used to know so well; her company not yet a community, and the old man annoyed with his owners, his men, his coal, and his mistaken choice of a profession—the first week never sees the barometer set fair for reading. Some minds indeed will never hold tight to a book when at sea. Mine will not. What is literature when you have a trade wind behind you? I have tried a classical author then, but it was easier to keep the eye on the quivering light from the seas reflected on the bright wall of my cabin. It might have been the very spirit of life dancing in my own little place. It was joyous. It danced lightly till I was hypnotised, and slept in full repose on a certitude of the virtue of the world.

But recently there was an attempt, the time being spring, to cut out the dead books from my shelves, the books in which there was no longer any sign of life. Then I took that classical author, rejected one memorable voyage, and looked at his covers. When he was on the ship with me I found him meagre and incommunicative. Something has happened to him in the meantime, however. He is all right now. His covers, I notice, have been nibbled by exotic cockroaches, and their cryptic message adds a value to the classic which I find new and good. Scattered on the floor, too, I see a number of guide books. They are soiled. They are ragged. Their maps are hanging out. When I really needed them I was shy of being seen in their company, and they were left in the ship’s cabin during the day, or in the hotel bedroom. The maps and plans were studied. Sometimes they were torn out of a book and pocketed; I could never find the courage to walk about Rome or Palermo with a Baedeker. It always seemed to me like the wearing of a little Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes on the coat collar.

Those guide books were more interesting on the wet days of a journey, when it was impossible, or undesirable, to go roaming. They were full of descriptions of those things one must on no account overlook when in a country. Yet in the fine morning after a wet day, when I went out without a guide book, the little living peculiarities of the town, which the book had not even mentioned—because everybody ought to be aware of them, of course—were so remarkable that the place where Ariadne was turned into a fountain, and where Aphrodite tried to seduce another handsome young mortal, were forgotten.

So once, when hunting near Syracuse for “the famous Latonie, or stone quarries, in certain of which the Athenian prisoners were confined,” and several of whom were spared, so the book said, because they could repeat choruses of Euripides, I met a cheerful goatherd, an old man, with a newly fallen kid under his arm, who told me, in an American language so modern that I hardly knew it, that he used to sell peanuts in Chicago. He did not repeat choruses from Euripides, but even the great dramatist, I am sure, would have been surprised by the fables of the peanut merchant. I forgot the quarries, while listening to them. The fabulist and I sat with our backs against a boulder over which leaned an olive tree. The goats stood around, and stared at us; and not, I believe, without some understanding of their master’s stories.

I am reminded of this because a map of southeastern Sicily is hanging out of a book, the banner of a red-letter day. I rescued the volume from the mass of discarded lumber, and found that inside the cover of the book I had drawn a plan of the harbour of Tunis. Why? I’ve forgotten the reason. But I remember Tunis, for I had been drawn thither by this very book, which had said that nobody should leave the Mediterranean without seeing Tunis. There it was, one day. From the deck of my French ship I saw electric trams and the familiar hôtels des étrangers. A galley with pirates at its sweeps was pulling almost alongside us, and desperately I hailed it, threw in my bag, and directed them to take me to a steamer flying the Italian flag, for that steamer, clearly enough, was leaving Tunis at once. That was the ship for me. There was some difficulty with the dark ruffians who manned the galley, who followed me aboard the steamer. There they closed round me, a motley and savage crew. They demanded gold in some quantity, and with menacing flourishes, shattering voices, and hot eager eyes. Their leader was a huge negro in a white robe and a turban, whose expressive gargoyle, with a loose red gash across its lower part, had been pitted by smallpox. I did not like the look of him. He towered over me, and leaned down to bring his ferocity closer to my face. Some Italian sailors stopped to watch the scene, and I thought they were pitying this Englishman. But the latter was weary of Roman ruins, of hotels, of other thoughtful provision for strangers surprising in its open and obvious accessibility, and of guides and thieves—especially of thieves, shameless, insatiable, and arrogant in their demands for doing nothing whatever. At first he had paid them, for he was a weak and silly stranger who did not know the land; but now, sick of it all, he turned wearily on that black and threatening gargoyle while it was still in full spate of Arabic, shook his fist at it, and cried suddenly what chief mates bawl when things are in a desperate plight and constraint is useless. To his astonishment and relief the negro stepped back, turned to his crew and said to them sadly, in plain English, “Come on, it’s no bloody good.” The gang left that ship as modestly as carol singers who find they have been chanting “Christians Awake” to an empty house. Now, evidently guide books cannot lead you to such pleasing interludes, and may even beguile you away from them. I mean that books cannot guide you to those best rewards for travel, unless, of course, they are old and stained. They are full then of interesting addenda of which their editors know nothing, and of symbols with an import only one traveller may read. So when the days come in which, as guide books, they will not be wanted, you may read in them what is not there. This very guide book to the Mediterranean, for example, under the heading of “Oran,” describes it as “the capital of a province, military division, 60,000 inhabitants. It is not certain that Oran existed in the time of the Romans.” Some people would like us to believe that no place on earth can be of much interest unless the Romans once flattened it into meekness. But we have heard far too much of these Romans. They bore us. To-day we call them captains of industry and company promoters. Oran, or what I could see of it in the dark when we arrived, was as rich in promise as though it were thoroughly impeded with classical ruins. There were lights that were a concourse of planets, and as I lay reading in my bunk the ship was so quiet that you could hear the paint crack on a bulkhead rivet. I was reading this very guide book then, and it told me that beyond those calm and mysterious planets were Tlemçen, and Ein Sefra, “an oasis 1,110 metres above the sea level belonging to the Duled Sidi Sheikh. Here one catches a glimpse of the Algerian desert, which is the fringe of the Great Sahara.” I caught that glimpse, too, the next week.

These guide books, when you are home again, are as good as great literature. There, for another instance, is Baedeker’s “Switzerland.” Now the truth is, that book, bought for the first journey to the Alps, was among the things I forgot to pack. It was never missed. It is only to-day that we find it is indispensable. For it was bought in the winter of 1913. Again it was night, when we arrived. A sleigh met us, and took us noiselessly into the vaguely white unknown. Pontresina is a good name. In the morning there were the shutters of a bedroom to be opened, and a child who was with me gazed with wide eyes when the morning light discovered to him a field of ice poised ethereally on clouds, though the night had not gone from the valley below us; above the ice was a tincture of rose on far peaks. Is it likely that he will forget it? Or I? In any case, there is a diorama of those peaks in our guide book, and what rosy light is absent from that picture we can give to it.

X

Mayne Reid once persuaded us that to have a full life we should kill grizzly bears, bison and Indians. We were so sure he was right that school and work in London were then the proof of our reduction to pallor in servitude. We have been, since then, near enough to a bison to try it with a biscuit, but have never seen the smoke of a wigwam even in the distance. There remains with us a faint hope that a day will come when we shall see that smoke, for such a name as Athabasca is still in the world of the topless towers of Ilium; but some records of modern hunters of big game, published exultingly, have cured us of an old affliction of the mind. So far as we are concerned the lives of lions and bears are secure.

We now open a new volume on sport with an antipathy increased to a repugnance we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent narrative by an American writer, who had been collecting in Africa for a museum. He confessed that if he had not been a scientist he would have felt remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the infant, without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother; a nice group. That tableau, at that moment when the job was neatly finished, must have looked rather like good luck when collecting types in a foreign slum. He must have had a happy feeling when skinning the child.

The heroic big-game hunter, with his picturesque gear, narrow escapes, and dreadful hardships, is a joke it is easy to understand since our so very recent experience of man himself as a dangerous animal. The sabre-toothed tiger of the past was a dove compared with the creature who is pleased to suppose that he was created in the likeness of his Maker. No predatory dinosaur ever equalled man’s praiseworthy understudy of the Angel of Death. Some years ago, on the arrival of fresh news at Headquarters in France of another most ingenious and successful atrocity, I remarked to a staff officer of the Intelligence Department that if this sort of thing developed progressively it would end in the enforced recruitment of orangutans. But that officer happened to be a naturalist. “No good,” he replied. “They wouldn’t do these things.” Such acts are the prerogative of man, who won the privilege in his upward progress.

With his modern weapons and ammunition, an experienced sportsman challenging a lion stands in little more danger than if he were buying a rug. The shock of his bullet would stagger a warehouse. It pulps the vitals of the animal. There is a friend of mine whose pastime it is to shoot big game, and we should pity any tiger he meets. It is not a tiger to him. It is only a target, which he regards with the composure into which he settles when someone brings him a long drink on a salver; and his common habit with a target is to group his shots till they blot out the bull’s eye. What chance has a tiger against so tender a creature? A rabbit would have more, for it is smaller. But at least it can be said for my friend that it merely happens that he prefers such fun to golf; he attaches no importance to it. Though he has shot an unfortunate example of every large mammal Asia has to offer, he does not plead that he has done so in the name of Science. Man himself, with appliances that reduce the craft of the tiger to a few interesting tricks, and an arm which paralyses a whale with one blow, is the most terrible animal in the world. He is the Gorgon. It is his glance which turns life to stone. Science, as stuffed animals are often called, excuses the abomination of any holocaust. If a nightingale were dilated with cotton-wool instead of music, that would be “science,” supposing it were the last of the nightingales. The reason given for the slaughter of so many harmless gorillas in the neighbourhood of Lake Kivu by several travellers was that those rare animals are dying out, and museums required them. Yet it may be said for us that these sportsmen find it necessary to excuse their behaviour to-day. They must explain at least why they feel no remorse. No longer may one destroy a family of apes and boast of it afterwards. If the crime is mentioned publicly, its author is careful to observe that he so acted as a naturalist, no doubt that we may thus distinguish him from a man who would have done the same in the name of religion. We are sometimes advised that the value of a training in science is that it makes honesty of thought more usual than we find it in the ordinary man, who merely rationalises his desires; and for guidance we are directed to examine the sad mental results which come of a purely literary or a political training. We should like to believe this, yet when we find a zoölogist writing to the Times to confess that he would have flinched from the slaughter of a certain rare and fragile creature had he not known that his deed was excused because it was committed in the name of a museum, then a confusion of thought, probably literary, compels us to suggest that science may be no better an apology for a blackguardly act than is rum-running; and we are not forgetting that some of the worst of man’s ferocities have been performed solemnly and with full ritual in the name of God.

But the ethics of the hunt are not to be defined by men whose own boyhood was in the period when the rapid growth of factories and railways was causing a first wholesale clearance of wild life, both human and bestial, from the earth. We are too near to the raw trophies and benefits. That becomes clear, when, as we read in the news not long ago, American warships used live whales as targets for gun-practice. Makers of soap, too, would protest that it is right for commerce to send explosive harpoons into the same creatures, because the supply of fat is thereby increased. The matter is very difficult. Obviously if we want the land the buffaloes cannot have it, and if we want their oil the whales must part with it. The stage which Thoreau reached when he gave up fishing is several centuries ahead for most of us. My own notions about hunting would not bear a close inspection by either humanitarians or sportsmen. If one has heard only a rat whimper when an owl clutched it, and heard it continue to cry as the bird, with talons set vice-like, sat blinking leisurely in deep and complacent thought, then the scheme of things does seem a little sorry, though rats with their fleas are what they are. The scheme, too, includes liver-flukes and ticks. There are forms of life as deadly to man as he is to other animals. One’s right to kill is no more than one’s need and ability to kill. But if man brought compassion into the world, and bestows it on creatures other than his fellows, how did he come by it, and what may be its value in the evolution of life? Is it useless, like saintliness?

XI

The first officer, the only man in the ship who could converse freely with me in English, waved his hand as he went overside. He was going ashore to some friends. The shore of the island was just out of hailing distance. The setting sun was below the height of the land. The huts among the columns of the palms along the beach were becoming formless. Even by day our steamer, among those islands of Indonesia, gave me the idea that she was a vagrant from another and a coarser world. Land was nearly always in sight, but whether distant or close to our beam it might have been a vagary, the vaporous show of a kingdom with which we could have no contact. It would have no name. It had not been seen before. We were the first to see it, and the last. To-morrow some other shape would be there, or nothing. The only reality was our steamer and its Dutchman, chance blunderers into a region which was not for us. Even when the sun was over the ship, and the blaze on the deck was like exposure to a furnace, the coast in sight was but the filmy stuff of an hallucination.

But now the sun was going, and in those seas that spectacle was always strangely disturbing. It was a celestial display which should have been accompanied by the rolling of thunder and the shaking of the earth. One watched for the sudden peopling of those far off and luminous battlements of the sky. But there was no sound. There was no movement. It was an empty display; we might have been surprised by the beginning of a rehearsal which was postponed. One could not help feeling the immanence of a revelation to men who now, open-mouthed, had paused in their foolish activities, and were waiting; and so it was astonishing, after that warning prelude, that only darkness should fall. We were reprieved. Perhaps Heaven did not know what to do with us.

The pale huts receded into nothing. The black filigree of palm fronds above them dissolved in night. The smooth water of the anchorage vanished without a whisper. The day was done. In the alleyway on which my cabin opened a few electric sconces made solid a short walk, which was suspended with vague ends in the dark. The weight of a heated silence, in which there was no more to be discerned than that short promenade, fell over the ship. It was astonishing that she could be so quiet.

In my cabin even an electric fan would have been a companion, but it would not work; it was dumb. The cabin was only a recess in solitude. Every book there had been read, and the advertisements in the newspapers, which were two months old, and had been used for packing. When I left London I took with me some clear and scientific advice about the collecting of insects. “Not butterflies and moths.” My instructions were specific. “Only diptera, hymenoptera, and bugs like these.” The bugs called “these” were exhibited and demonstrated in their British counterparts.

It appeared that I might be of aid to a new study, which now is earnestly seeking an answer to the growing challenge of the insect world to man’s dominion of this earth. This quest was urged on me with cool insistence, careless of any suspicion I might have had that there may be, to an overseeing and directing mind unknown, worse pests than bugs on earth. I accepted the job, the tins, the pins, the forceps, the bottles, chemicals, nets and all, and submitted to a series of elementary lessons. I began with the feeling of a Jain in the matter; but at last was persuaded that I should be performing a social service, for I was reminded that a tse-tse fly could make as good an exhibit of me as ever man made of a gorilla.

With some little entomological routine to be got through daily I began to understand why it was the Victorian naturalists showed a fortitude in adversity which, had they resolved, not on beetles but on something nobler, might have got them to Truth itself. On tropical days so searching that nothing but a sudden threat would have moved a man from where he happened to be resting, I picked up my net with alacrity, filled a little bag with bottles, and toiled to some place which, so the sun and wind told me, would make the shade of old Wallace eagerly readjust his ghostly spectacles as he watched me; and I saw clearly enough then that at an earlier age and with a stouter nerve I should have found fun in collecting record horns and tusks. It was usually in a secluded corner where I was alone; though once, near a Malay village in Celebes, in a clearing which had already become a tangled shrubbery again, I noticed at last a native, his krise in his sarong, sternly watching me. He stood like a threatening image, and whenever I glanced casually in his direction, which I did as often as dignity allowed, he still had that severe look. Presently I found that this area was a Mohammedan graveyard, for I tripped over one of the hidden stones while stealthily following the eccentric course of a fly which looked attractively malignant. The Malay stood over me as I pulled out some thorns with forced deliberation. He did not speak. He picked up a spare net, and spent the rest of the morning adding industriously to my collection.

The close scrutiny of one patch of forest, into which direct sunlight fell, with the eye watchful for the slightest movement, gave one a notion of the density with which that apparently empty jungle was peopled. A biologist once said that most of the world’s protoplasm is locked up in the bodies of insects. You would think so when, having missed a miniature bogie with the net, you scrutinised the place where it had so miraculously disappeared. (Sometimes it was in a fold of the net all the time, discovered when it nailed a careless hand.)

Nothing appears to be there but fronds and branches, yet as soon as the image of the object you missed begins to fade from your recollection, you see, sitting under a leaf, a robber fly eating a victim as large as itself. Near it is a big grasshopper so closely resembling the leaves and stem with which it is aligned that your sight is apt to take it in as a slow transmutation of the foliage. Touch him, and he shoots off like a projectile. His noisy flight betrays a number of things. They move, and then there they are. A shield bug, whose homeland cousins are hated by fruit-growers, moves uneasily in its place. You had supposed it was a coloured leaf-scar. Spiders and mantids run and drop. You mark the fall of one creature, and then are aware that a column of ants is marching through the dead leaves at your feet. Every inch appears to be occupied, where a casual glance would have seen nothing in the whole front of the woods.

The mere collecting of these creatures is but a pastime, though it is easy enough to find species that are unknown to entomologists; yet of very few of those innumerable forms is the life-history known, though some of the little items of the forest prove disastrous, with acquired habits, in the plantations. Man quite easily displaces the tigers and their lairs, but it is more than likely that the little things, of which he has been contemptuous, may put up a more remarkable fight for a place in the sun than he will enjoy.

When the ship was quiet at night, that was the time when the bottles were emptied, and the creatures were put into paper envelopes, with a place and date. The electric sconces outside at night made good hunting ground. Moths like translucent jewels reposed on them; but the luminous plaques were chiefly valuable as attractions for mosquitoes and some flies which would have been unbelievable even by day.

One night, unable for a time to do more work because my hands were wet with sweat caused by my concentration on small and delicate objects, I looked up at some books facing me on the table. A creature with eyes like tiny orange glow lamps was sitting there watching me, its wings tremulous with energy.

It was a moth, demi-octavo in size, and I became at once a little nervous in its presence. I assured it earnestly that moths were quite outside my instructions. Nevertheless, when I rose gently to inspect it, so desirable a beauty I had never seen before. It was jet black, body and wings, though its wings were marked sparsely with hieroglyphics in gold. Was it real? I got the net, and secured it neatly as it rose; brought a killing bottle—might I not have one such creature when Bates and Wallace slew their thousands?—and watched the captive where it quivered, though not in alarm, in a loose fold of the muslin. It was quiet, making a haze of its wings, at times checking them so that I could attempt a translation of its golden message. It had a face ... rather a large black face, in which those glowing eyes were very conspicuous.

I took out the cork of the bottle, looked again at the quivering and fearsome beauty, and put back the cork and shoved the bottle away. It was impossible. It would have been worse than murder. They who destroy beauty are damned. I felt I did not want to be damned. That wonderful form, and the stillness, and the silence, overcame me. This creature was not mine. I freed the prisoner. It shot round the cabin, settled again on a book, and watched me, with its wings vibrating, until I had finished. A dim suspicion that it was more than a moth was inconsequential, but natural.

XII

The men who are under an infernal spell, a spell which our best political economists have proved cannot be and ought not to be broken, and who therefore must run to and fro between London and Croydon all their wretched lives, are astonished when an infant shows more initiative and ventures to New York. But why shouldn’t it? Its journey proved as easy as a perambulator and a nurse. There is nothing in being carried about. Where steamships and railways go anyone may go. You have only to take a seat, and wait. A child could travel in independence from here to Macassar, which is a mere name through distance, and it would but add interest to a long voyage for doting seamen. The trouble for a restless soul begins only when he would turn aside, and go where other people do not. Then he finds that the herd has no sympathy for one of its members who would leave the farmer’s field; no sympathy, no advice, no help; nothing but curt warnings and mocking prophecies.