London River eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 166 pages of information about London River.

London River eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 166 pages of information about London River.
though motionless.  The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of a dark past.  Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by the frail effort of his will.  Once they were, but now, in some moods, they are merely remembered.  Only the men busy on the deck of the ship below are real.  Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you people on it are being drawn unresisting into that lower world of shades.  You release yourself from this spell with an effort, and look at the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet.  What are their thoughts?  Do they know?  Have they also seen the ghosts?  Have they felt stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, tales that were told?  They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs.  A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her.  She is going.  We watch the eastern mists take her from us.  For we never are so passive and well-disciplined to the things which compel us but rebellion comes at times—­misgiving that there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent.  The gates to the outer world close again.

There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere.  It is our oldest road, and now has many bypaths.  Near Poverty Corner is a building which recently was dismissed with a brief, humorous reference in a new guide to our City—­a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a brick front topped by a clock-face:  Fenchurch Street Station.  Beyond its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would guess to be at the end of it.  The train runs over a wilderness of tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and scored as though by a withering heat.  Nothing grows there; nothing could live there.  Smoke still pours from it, as though it were volcanic, from numberless vents.  The region is without sap.  Above its expanse project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving great areas.  When the track descends slightly, you see cavities in that cliff which runs parallel with your track.  The desert is actually burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation.  Something does live there.  That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunneled and inhabited.  The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen.  It is the beginning of Dockland.  That the life is in upright beings, each with independent

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Project Gutenberg
London River from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.