View PDF version of this page

NEW SEASONS the gathering twilight, plunging through crests of foam. By the following morning we were at Port Said, where we passed a long, wearisome day. There was rain there also, and the sandy roads were in puddles. The sense of the East was by this time distinct in all of us ; but it was an East blighted and draggled, a forlorn mockery of its fame. The day after, how-ever, things at last took a different turn. I found, on waking early, my cabin aglow with sunrise. I looked from the window : sparkles were leaping on the waters. I went on deck, and there—how shall I describe the spectacle?—rose-coloured fleeces wan-dered on wastes of transparent purple ; the naked dome of the sky was soaring and arching over me ; and the dark waves heaved, waiting to be lightened into azure. It was some moments before I realised something else : then it burst on me—we were hardly two miles from land. Opposite to us Jaffa was gleaming ; and stretching to north and south of it were the brown coasts and the tufted palms of Pales-tine ; and inland, the violet outlines of the hills about Jerusalem. And now began the process of a new birth, for which all that had gone before had been a prepara-tion—the birth, so long delayed, out of the Western winter, and the homely associations which thus far, like winter birds, had been following us—the birth out of these into a world increasingly different. At Beyrout, where I spent a day on shore, and where in D

View PDF version of this page