, in the
latitude of Fiji and the Society Islands, between those two: and after a
time the cigar drooped and dropped from my mouth, and sleep overcame
me, and I slept there, in the lap of the Infinite.
* * * * *
So that something preserves me, Something, Someone: _and for what?_ ...
If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for
lying there on the poop, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed on
the ice, far, far yonder in the forgotten hyperborean North: that I was
in an Arabian paradise, a Garden of Peaches; and I had a very long
vision of it, for I walked among the trees, and picked the fruit, and
pressed the blossoms to my nostrils with breathless inhalations of love:
till a horrible sickness woke me: and when I opened my eyes, the night
was black, the moon gone down, everything wet with dew, the sky arrayed
with most glorious stars like a thronged bazaar of tiaraed rajahs and
begums with spangled trains, and all the air fragrant with that mortal
scent; and high and wide uplifted before me--stretching from the
northern to the southern limit--a row of eight or nine inflamed smokes,
as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean foundry a-work all night, most
solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn night: eight or nine, I
should say, or it might be seven, or it might be ten, for I did not
count them; and from those craters puffed up gusts of encrimsoned
material, here a gust and there a gust, with tinselled fumes that
convolved upon themselves, and sparks and flashes, all veiled in a
garish haze of light: for the foundry worked, though languidly; and upon
a rocky land four miles ahead, which no chart had ever marked, the
_Speranza_ drove straight with the current of the phosphorus sea.
Pages:
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312