sprung from this water and its, shores; we seemed to have left reality,
to be travelling through live wonder.

And the fantastic thought sprang into my mind: I have died. This is the
voyage of my soul in the wild. I am in the final wilderness of
spirits--lost in the ghost robe that wraps the earth. There seemed in
all this white murmuration to be millions of tiny hands stretching out to
me, millions of whispering voices, of wistful eyes. I had no fear, but a
curious baked eagerness, the strangest feeling of having lost myself and
become part of this around me; exactly as if my own hands and voice and
eyes had left me and were groping, and whispering, and gazing out there
in the eeriness. I was no longer a man on an estuary steamer, but part
of sentient ghostliness. Nor did I feel unhappy; it seemed as though I
had never been anything but this Bedouin spirit wandering.

We passed through again into the stillness of plain mist, and all those
eerie sensations went, leaving nothing but curiosity to know what this
was that we had traversed. Then suddenly the sun came flaring out, and
we saw behind us thousands and thousands of white gulls dipping,
wheeling, brushing the water with their wings, bewitched with sun and
mist. That was all. And yet that white-winged legion through whom we
had ploughed our way were not, could never be, to me just gulls--there
was more than mere sun-glamour gilding their misty plumes; there was the
wizardry of my past wonder, the enchantment of romance.
1912.




MEMORIES