It is my belief that that larger Self whom they will
call protecting Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand
in affairs oftener than we think! Leaving the
Palos road, I went to the sea as I had done yesterday
and again sat under heaped sand with about me a sere
grass through which the wind whined. At first
it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish voice.
Sitting thus, I might have looked toward Africa, but
I knew now that I was not going to Africa. Often,
perhaps, in the unremembered past I had been in Africa;
often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil would be
under my foot, but now I was not going there!
To-day I looked westward over River-Ocean, unknown
to our fathers and unknown to ourselves. It was
unknown as the future of the world.
Ocean piled before me. From where I lay it seemed
to run uphill to one pale line, nor blue nor white,
set beneath the solid gray. Over that hilltop,
what? Only other hills and plains, water, endlessly
water, until the waves, so much mightier than waves
of that blue sea we knew best, should beat at last
against Asia shore! So high, so deep, so vast,
so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers!
No sails over the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast
save close at hand where mariners held to the skirts
of Mother. Europe. Ocean vast, Ocean black,
Ocean unknown. Yet there, too, life and the knowing
of life ran somehow continuous.
It wiled me from my smaller self. How had we
all suffered, we the whole earth! But we were
moving, we the world with none left out, moving toward
That which held worlds, which was conscious above
worlds. Long the journey, long the adventure,
but it was not worth while fearing, it was not worth
while whining! I was not alone Jayme de Marchena,
nor Juan Lepe, nor this name nor that nor the other.
There was now a great space of quiet in my mind.
Suddenly formed there the face and figure of Don Enrique
de Cerda whose life I had had the good hap to save.
He was far away with the Queen and King who beleaguered
Granada. I had not seen him for ten years.
A moment before he had rested among the host of figures
in the unevenly lighted land of memory. Now he
stood forth plainly and seemed to smile.
I took the leading. With the inner eye I have
seen lines of light like subtle shining cords running
between persons. Such a thread stretched now
between me and Enrique de Cerda. I determined
to make my way, as Juan Lepe, through the mountains
and over the plain of Granada to Santa Fe.
CHAPTER II
Set will to an end and promptly eyes open to
means! I did not start for Granada from Palos
but from Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter
in a small merchant train carrying goods of sorts
to Zarafa that was a mountain town taken from the
Moors five years back. I was to these folk Juan
Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man used to ships but
now for some reason tired of them. My merchants
