But when I came down again, northward from the high sandstone hill, and was in the fields again near running water, and drinking wine from a cup carved with Roman emblems, I began to wonder whether the Desert had not put before my mind, as they say it can do before the eye of the traveller, a mirage.  Is there such an influence?  Are there such men?

THE DEPARTURE

Once, in Barbary, I grew tired of unusual things, especially of palms, and desired to return to Europe and the things I knew; so I went down from the hills to the sea coast, and when after two days I had reached the railway, I took a train for Algiers and reached that port at evening.

From Algiers it is possible to go at once and for almost any sum one chooses to any part of the world.  The town is on a sharp slope of a theatre of hills, and in the quiet harbour below it there are all sorts of ships, but mostly steamships, moored with their sterns towards the quay.  For there is no tide here, and the ships can lie quite still.

I sat upon a wall of the upper town and considered how each of these ships were going to some different place, and how pleasant it was to roam about the world.  Behind the ships, along the stone quays, were a great number of wooden huts, of offices built, into archways, of little houses, booths, and dens, in each of which you could take your passage to some place or other.

“Now,” said I to myself, “now is the time to be free.”  For one never feels master of oneself unless one is obeying no law, plan, custom, trend, or necessity, but simply spreading out at ease and occupying the world.  In this also Aristotle was misled by fashion, or was ill-informed by some friend of his, or was, perhaps, lying for money when he said that liberty was obedience to a self-made law; for the most distant hint of law is odious to liberty.  True, it is more free to obey a law of one’s own making than of some one else’s; just as if a man should give himself a punch in the eye it would be less hurtful and far less angering than one given by a passer-by; yet to suffer either would not be a benefit of freedom.  Liberty cannot breathe where the faintest odour of regulation is to be discovered, but only in that ether whose very nature is largeness.  Oh!  Diviner Air! how few have drunk you, and in what deep draughts have I!

I had a great weight of coined, golden, metallic money all loose in my pocket.  There was no call upon me nor any purpose before me.  I spent an hour looking down upon the sea and the steamships, and taking my pick out of all the world.