By the time that man has seen these things and a few
others that go with a boom he may say that he has
lived, and talk with his enemies in the gate.
He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the
inward kernel of that romance, which some? little
folk say is vanished. Here they lie in their
false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and
Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know
where to look. The adventurers and captains courageous
of old have only changed their dress a little and
altered their employment to suit the world in which
they move. Clive came down from Lobengula’s
country a few months ago protesting that there was
an empire there, and finding very few that believed.
Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated
iron hut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since
then he has altered the map considerably to the advantage
of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire is set
on ballot-boxes and small lies. The illustrious
Don Quixote to-day lives on the north coast of Australia
where he has found the treasure of a sunken Spanish
galleon. Now and again he destroys black fellows
who hide under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins,
with a still younger Boscawen for his second, was
till last year chasing slave-dhows round Tajurrah;
they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be
grilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval
has been holding the ‘Republic’ of Mexico
by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.
The others, big men all and not very much afraid of
responsibility, are selling horses, breaking trails,
drinking sangaree, running railways beyond the timberline,
swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and making
cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters
of the world. Only people will not believe this
when you tell them. They are too near things
and a great deal too well fed. So they say of
the most cold-blooded realism: ‘This is
romance. How interesting!’ And of over-handled,
thumb-marked realism: ‘This is indeed romance!’
It is the next century that, looking over its own,
will see the heroes of our time clearly.
Meantime this earth of ours—we hold a fair
slice of it so far—is full of wonders and
miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default,
it is good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell
of them all.
ON ONE SIDE ONLY
NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., June-July 1892.
‘The truth is,’ said the man in the train,
’that we live in a tropical country for three
months of the year, only we won’t recognise.
Look at this.’ He handed over a long list
of deaths from heat that enlivened the newspapers.
All the cities where men live at breaking-strain were
sending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the
cities, themselves apostles of the Gospel of Rush,
were beseeching their readers to keep cool and not
to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon
them. The rivers were patched and barred with
Copyrights
Letters of Travel (1892-1913) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
