Part 9

To-day, in this delightful year of 1922, they are all at sixes and sevens. So is everything else, you may say, especially currency--let alone morals. But still, one regrets maps and statistics most because to lose them is to lose one's moorings. We are all adrift without them.

What fun it used to be before the war to discuss the various "Powers" (as they were called). There was a Power called "Germany," and there was another called "Austria," or sometimes "Austria-Hungary," and there was one called "Russia," and there was "the Anglo-Saxon Race," too, and all sorts of things.

When I was a very little boy there was an enormous green blob over the bottom right-hand corner of the map, marked "Turkey," and I remember a learned man telling me that a bit called "Rumania" did not really count as Turkey, and a bit called "Servia" was really quite separate: and they were marked round with a dotted line. But I thought this man an interfering hair-splitter. I was a human being, though so young, and I liked to stand squarely upon my two feet and to know exactly where I was. So I thought of a country called "Turkey," inhabited by people called "Turks," and I used to see, wandering all over their country, animals called "Turkeys," which, I had been told by some foolish older person, took their name from this district. The young are not yet broken-in to change.

So, on through my early and middle life there was a recognisable Europe. One knew the debatable points (at least, on the map), but there were frontiers. There were powerful centres also, and anomalies to season the dish.

Where is all that to-day?

Thank God, this island at least has a frontier. It is the inviolate sea. I remember a boy at school who used to read the passage "the violet sea," so as to make sense, and I applaud him still. "Surrounded by the violet sea," read this sturdy youth. We all knew what "violet" meant: it was a sort of blue. But what the devil was "inviolate"! Lucidity is the soul of style. Therefore, I say, I applaud that youth.

Anyhow, colour or no, brown, green, or grey, the sea sounds all round England. Those who live in this island know where it begins and where it ends, in spite of the bookish people who say that one frontier is the enemy's coastline. (Heaven have mercy upon them, they are living in the past. Some day I will show them an aeroplane!) North of the Pyrenees nobody on the Continent can say as much to-day: since the war! One country has a frontier expanding outwards, bulging, and another has ceased to be a country; and a third, whilst still a country, has but a theoretical frontier which feels like touchpaper, or like burnt rag; and yet another is a new country, sprung up out of the effect of the war, and with frontiers which are to the old strict frontiers what the chopped-up prose of the new poets is to Pope or Dryden.

I do wish the maps would come back, but I fear they will not come back in my time. I see that, in despair, the people who must sell maps or perish are taking to printing merely physical maps, maps of mountains and rivers and seas. They are returning to Pan and the original gods of this ironic globe. They are (virtually) saying: "Mankind has abandoned its job. Men are no longer political. We yield to you, spirits of the stream and of the hill, the throne we once possessed."

I do not say that the advertisers, printers, company promoters, touts, circularisers, boomsters, spell-binders, and all the rest of the happy throng who are producing the new atlases use these very words; but that is what they are at, all the same.

Only the other day a man showed me a superb map of Mexico and the United States (as we used to call them in our dear old-fashioned language) up to about the cañon of the Colorado. I said to him: "It is very beautiful, and the contours stand out. The rivers are of a bold blue: the swamps are green: the mountains brown. But I do not see the division between the United States and Mexico." He said to me: "It has not yet been put in because of the League of Nations"--a funny reason....

Then there are statistics. Anything in the world can be proved by statistics, and it was half the occupation of a serious man with a bee in his bonnet (as most serious men have) to work statistics, to knead them with the fists, and to tread them with the feet, and to juggle them with the thumbs, and to smooth them down with the palm, and to pat them into shape with the fingers, and to square them off with a trowel, and to bake them very cunningly into a hard form. He, having done this, would prove to you anything on earth--I mean before the year 1914. He would prove to you that the French were going down and the Germans going up: that everybody was going to talk English in fifty years: that London (oh! joyful thought!) would stretch out beyond Dorking and Reigate, beyond Hertford and Marlow, within the life of a man: that the United States (I mean America) would easily grow to eat up Europe: that most of the African deserts would be filled with cads, and that the greatness of a nation depended not upon its religion, still less upon its morals, hardly at all upon its courage or intelligence, but wholly upon its hoicking out of coal.

I do wish those statistics would come back! We have had none of them for so many years! We cannot talk of the birth-rate of Egypt or Persia. We no longer know what is meant by export and import ... and with these two dread words another suggestion works its way into my mind.

The war has produced propaganda. Truth took to its bed in the spring of 1915 and died unregretted, with few attendants, about a year later. Everything since then has been propaganda.

It is an imperative duty to serve one's country, and one's country in danger of death had to be served by silence and by lies. But now the root has struck, and all this lying and all this silence has become a habit. So to-day, when you read this or that in a paper, you know very well that you are not reading any cold truth at all, but an advertisement. Time was, if a public document said: "The road from Pekaboo to Chakanugga is under repair after the third mile-stone," you believed it and went round by a side way. But to-day, when you read such things, you know that it means, not that the road is under repair, but that it is to the advantage of some man, corporation, policy or State to suggest that it is under repair.... If it _is_ under repair, well and good ... but it is a pure chance. They use the truth when it suits them, but only because it suits them. Most of the time they lie.

And here, like a man discovering a diamond in blue clay, let me admit the great exception. Through all this welter of falsehood the Admiralty stands firm. I pick up my charts, I read my various "Pilots" (especially my beloved "English Channel Pilot I"), and the truth comes out, august, white-robed, with level brows, contemptuous of advocacy. The documents of this great Department please me like the Creed. Their level voice is the voice of doom. "_Halnacker Mill open of Bognor Church Spire leads through the Swatchway._" It is true that the sweeps have fallen from Halnacker Mill and you cannot see it as well from sea as you used to do. If you will allow me (without offence, I hope) to tell you the plain truth, not one man in fifty in one day out of ten has ever seen Halnacker Mill from outside the Owers. All he sees, even in fair weather, is a sort of blur, which he hopes to be Sussex, or Paradise. Anyhow, the document, the record, is there. If you can see Halnacker Mill, even with the sweeps gone down, and if you open it east of Bognor Church Spire, you will get through the Swatchway: if you don't you will strike the Owers, and I for one shall not care.

So it is with all these pronouncements of marble and of bronze.

"NOTE.--_The mariner will do well to avoid the passage of the Looe Stream at the fall of night against an adverse tide, especially if the wind is freshening from the south-west._" He will, by God! This is not a statement to frighten Germans or to pacify Jugo-Slavs. It is the thing itself. Stark Truth: Reality, the eldest-born Daughter of Heaven; that Goddess whom some call Aletheia from her lovely face, and others Ananke from her damnable muscles, the grip of whose hand when you ask her to lead you through this tangled world is extraordinarily firm, tactless and painful.

I then, who love statistics and maps, shall, for the next few months or years, confine myself to the publications of the Admiralty in the "Channel Pilot" I and II, in "The West Coast Pilot" and the rest. Their pictures of the British coast are the best I know. The information of the Admiralty is exact, and its motives (alone of the motives now governing our chaotic world) are pure.

A SHORT ADVENTURE

It was in Morocco: it was not yet day; and there was a little drizzling rain of that tiresome, feverish sort which you get in those outlandish countries south of Europe and cousin to the desert, only saved from being desert by this same evil rain which does sometimes fall on them. I woke and rose before my companions, and to their annoyance made them rise also, telling them that we needed every hour if we were to reach the sea before the next night.

There was no road, not even such a track as one may see in the American West. Only here and there the sign that wheels had passed over the interminable dusty mud of the plain. We started the unfortunate motor-car and jerked off northwards just as the sad, wet darkness was turning into a sad, wet day. Already the glimmering light showed us the forms of the land, but not yet any direction, and in that first half-hour, as the light grew, we twice urged back, at the peril of our gears, from thick boggy land to harder soil. Then, when it was full daylight, we could better determine our way. There was not a tree anywhere, not even on the distant mountains to the right. There was not a blade of grass. It was a wilderness, where I could see barren slopes and peaks as much as fifty miles away.

I have often wondered what the original Hebrew was for the term "howling," which so admirably describes a wilderness in the Bible. Some day I will look it up; for whoever got that metaphor knew how to write. Also these damnable empty spaces are not good for the soul: they isolate it beyond due measure.

And so we went North. At nearly every dry stream bed (they came at intervals of some five miles) we had to cast about for the passage. In each we feared to remain. But each was at last successfully passed, though I wondered how long the old machine would stand it. The car was, like most of these models of earlier years, very strongly built, and it was patient and willing; but we were asking too much of it.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning that we came at last to a true river, flowing between steep banks, perhaps thirty feet high or more; banks of crumbling earth, and even there not a shrub--mere water, coloured as tawny as the waste itself, and cutting through the waste without result. Here it was that the car gave up the ghost. Crawling down the mass of mud upon the zigzag it reached, with many groans and grindings, the river bed. It crossed the ford, making a noise like a saw; but when it was asked to breast the further bank, in one last gallant effort it sobbed out its life and died.

Upon the height of the bank against the sky there stood a Spaniard, to whom, as is natural in that country, we spoke in French. He told us that near by we should find a small town. We begged him in the meanwhile to fetch us many labourers and a stout rope. This he did. We tied the rope to the front axle in two places, leaving its ends free in the shape of two traces, which traces were taken each by a dozen men, and so, cumbrously, were we hauled to the plateau above. There, sure enough, we saw as filthy a little town as ever was permitted by demons to survive; but the sea was still very far away.

What has always astonished me about these little towns of Islam is the apparent importance of their history compared with their present appearance. I know that it is the fashion to accept, literally enough, the stories of their past doings, and I know that I am going against the fashion in flatly refusing to accept those stories. I do not believe them. I do not believe them of Cordova, and I am fully prepared to disbelieve them of Granada itself. Certainly I disbelieve them of this little town which, as I have so abused it and as, after all, it gave me hospitality, I will not dishonour by name. Its wretched crumbling plaster, its low hovels, the lump of mud which it called a Mosque, the incredible accumulation of filth upon all sides, the air of stagnation and disease, the mere scale of the place, belied the exaggerations of the chronicles. And as I considered that I might have to spend there Heaven knows how many days while messengers were fetching what might or might not bring to life the poor dead car, I could not bear the prospect.

I therefore did something which I could not afford. I took aside the chief of my hauling gang of twenty-four and struck a bargain with him. I said to him: "I cannot possibly reach the port which I intended to reach over this illimitable wet mass of dusty earth; it is a day's journey away, even if the car were in working order. Is there no other place on the sea coast nearer by where I could get some sort of vessel to take me to a human land? I care not what vessel it is, even though it be one of those vessels which they beach, which are open without deck and run under one lateen sail," for I was not (at the nearest point) much more than a full hundred miles from Cadiz and the Ports of Spain.

He told me that there was one little third-rate port, if you could call it a port, and it was one day's walk away, or, say, five or six hours of marching. Then, at an enormous price, was it arranged with a new team that the car should be hauled by ropes, and hauled it was through the most incredible places, I sitting at the steering-wheel and good Moors hauling in two teams over sandy hillock and across awkward ghylls, until, from a height, we saw suddenly a new road properly modelled, European, Christian, civilised; and beyond it the mixed roofs of Christendom and of Islam; beyond these again the sea: that sea to which the Mohammedan Conqueror came more than a thousand years ago, and into which he rode his horse, saying: "Lord, God! Were I not stopped by this your sea I would ride farther and farther to the West, conquering all lands for your honour and that of your Prophet."

Once on this road things grew easier. There were vehicles and there was life. I paid off my team with a heavy heart, adding (as courtesy, custom, and necessity demanded) a great deal to the agreed sum. Then I went down into the little town.

It was a delightful surprise to find as pleasant a little town as ever the evil powers permitted to survive upon this earth. It was clean, it was even coquettish. It was neat; it climbed down the side of a steep hill and below it a charming little harbour held a brig of sorts, very old, many native boats--large open boats, used for fishing--and, to my great joy, a steamer!

It was a tramp steamer, and that of the smaller sort. It was the least of steamers; it was a Benjamin; but when I heard that it would try to start next day for Cadiz I thought it as great a piece of luck as a reprieve, or a fortune, or the sudden power to write a piece of verse which one has been in travail of for years. The next day I paid my money and I went on board, and at noon, which was high tide, that steamer got across the Bar.

Not all steamers can cross the Bar of this little port. Even as we went out we saw the rusty skeleton of a French ship which had gone to pieces in that same attempt a year before.

It was a dreadful Bar. I can only compare it to Appledore in Devon, and I doubt if there was any more water than there is over Appledore; perhaps less; but, as I have said, this steamer was the least of steamers and drew as little as a steamer can if it is to take the high seas at all.

There was little wind upon the Atlantic, but huge rollers coming in unbroken, one over the other, monotonously enormous, unceasing. And I said to myself, as she pointed her nose northward: "It will be slow; it must be endured; but we are making for Christian land, and this night perhaps (for what is a hundred miles?) I shall sleep in Paradise, or, at any rate, in Cadiz." But not at all. There happened a very strange thing indeed. Hardly had her nose been pointed North and the Bar perhaps half a mile behind us, and Africa the horrible, the sterile, the bare, now no longer a place of weariness but a coastline to be observed at my ease, when the man commanding this little ship dropped anchor and lit a pipe.

I have always made it a rule in all my travels not to speak to any one in command, though it is a rule I have found it very difficult to keep. The reason of this rule is that if you speak to any human being you may agree with him or you may quarrel with him. Now, quarrelling with an equal is entertaining or fatiguing according to one's mood, but quarrelling with one in command is always disastrous unless one has great ambition. Therefore, I did not ask the Captain why he did this thing; but I sat there on the little iron bridge and myself lit a pipe, and indulged in that infantile trick for disappointing fate, which is to imagine things worse than they are.

I said to myself: "We will probably remain anchored here for a day, or perhaps for two days, but within the week I shall see Christian land." And I wondered whether the food in my bag (which was bread and a little cold pork and a bottle of wine) would last out, or whether I should have to depend upon their food, and, if so, what their food was like.

So we lay under the hot sun, rising and falling with the enormous rolls, now in the trough and now on the crest, as regular as the swing of the great silver lamp in front of the Tomb of St. James in Galicia, but on a much bigger scale of rise and fall.

There came out of the North a little point of light, which was foam upon the bows of a boat. She came nearer; in an hour one could make out what she was; another tiny steamer; and in another hour she was fairly close at hand. I said to myself: "This is what we are waiting for." But not at all: the little steamer passed us, the Captain at my side muttered her name; she was off to some Southern port: perhaps Mogador.

And so the hours went by. But at last, not too late in the afternoon, the true cause of our delay appeared. A boat set out from the harbour upon the ebb, rode over the great swell with ease and dexterity; just caught the moment to toss on board of us, as the sea lifted it, a gentleman extremely well dressed, lean, courteous, and silent. He had preferred to take a comfortable luncheon on shore: had I known that such a thing was possible I would have done so too. His appearance was, for some reason, the signal.

The moment he got on board the ship woke up again, the anchor chain rattled, and she began her way. She made five knots but not seven (at least, that was my guess), and so all day long we wallowed, past Africa, and I saw upon my beam a little pirate town and after that a great mountain. At sunset there opened before me for the first time in my life the Gates of Hercules, and marvellous they were to see thus from the West under the reddening light. They were very far away, the narrowest part of the Straits one could barely see, tiny points upon the horizon, and the Rock of Gibraltar one could not see at all, either because it was too far away or because it was hidden round a point of land.

There are sights which if one sees them for the first time in boyhood, when one can still feel, are like memories of Heaven; great revelations which build up the mind for the rest of one's life. These sights seen in the decline of life still stir one, though there is a mournful contrast between their power now and their power then. I had not thought that any novel sight could move me as this, my first sight of the Straits, moved me in the fall of that glaring African day.

"Here," said I to myself, "is the entry to the antique world. This is the place out of which the first galleys came and knew the tide. Perhaps through this also (who knows?) long ships from Atlantis once hauled in with oars bringing arts and letters to those from whom we spring." Through these Straits at this hour was running that convergence of European life which is their modern mark. There were six steamers in sight and the light of others appeared as the darkness fell. After the emptiness of the Atlantic I felt as though the Straits of Gibraltar were a highway, and I amused myself during all the first hours of the night in calculating the courses of the ships by the red and the green lights and their eclipse.

There was no moon; the stars came out in the warm air, very brilliant and single, and we were nearly nose on for the pointers of the Bear.

But, Lord, how slow was that ship! The last light declined as we put Trafalgar on the beam; it was nearly calm, and I, with a vague memory of Trafalgar and Cadiz being quite close together on the map, thought myself already in harbour. But not at all! It was hour after hour, after hour. At last, long past midnight, and when I had hoped that first one light and then another might be the light of Cadiz (and had indeed long watched the light of Cadiz itself, which is white and flashing) and was still trying to make out far off to the West the glint of Spartel, I saw a sight which overjoyed me--a buoy with changing coloured lights, such a thing as marks the entrance to a fairway; and along that fairway we went, going the way that the ships of Tyre had gone before us into the great landlocked harbour; the ships of Tyre at which the Hebrew prophet railed so ineffectually. For he said that Tyre would come to nothing. So it did. But it took much longer than he thought.

We steered carefully between ships moored and took up a berth of which they knew, and dropped anchor, and the journey was done.

But I could not land till morning, and all the remaining hours of the night after so strange a passage I watched the Bear going about his monotonous round, and failing to take part in the baths of ocean, until at last it grew bright quickly over the Eastern hills and Cadiz turned white and the sea took on its colour. Then did I land in Christendom and I was greeted by the rising of the sun.

ON SAILING THE SEAS

I never sail the sea but I wonder what makes a people take to it and then leave it again. Nor have I ever seen an explanation of this; therefore it is that the speculation is of value, for it is one of those which go round and round upon themselves and never come to an end, and so give entertainment to the mind.

When you read in books that such-and-such a nation took to the sea you are usually given a very pretty little explanation of a material kind, as is the modern fashion. They took to the sea because they were situated at such-and-such a point, because the sea they lived on was sheltered, or because they had very good harbours.