We drag at the oars with aching arms, and
suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange
odors of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night--the
first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was
impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of
mysterious delight.
"We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven hours. Two pulled,
and he whose turn it was to rest sat at the tiller. We had made out the
red light in that bay and steered for it, guessing it must mark some
small coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned,
sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the
boat's nose against the end of a jutting wharf. We were blind with
fatigue. My men dropped the oars and fell off the thwarts as if dead. I
made fast to a pile. A current rippled softly. The scented obscurity of
the shore was grouped into vast masses, a density of colossal clumps of
vegetation, probably--mute and fantastic shapes. And at their foot the
semicircle of a beach gleamed faintly, like an illusion. There was not
a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed
like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.
"And I sat weary beyond expression, exulting like a conqueror, sleepless
and entranced as if before a profound, a fateful enigma.
"A splashing of oars, a measured dip reverberating on the level of
water, intensified by the silence of the shore into loud claps, made me
jump up.
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