EPILOGUE
Reading edition
Sydney N. S. W. August 1st, 1891.
It seems strange, after a year of summer and of free air, to have come almost suddenly into city and winter, however mild. I am writing to you by a coal fire, in a room high up, to which I go by an elevator, and I hear outside, in the damp cool air, the sound of the cable tramway, and the rolling of hansom cabs. Two weeks ago, I was resting on the ground in straw huts among mountains, and looking at darkish old gentlemen, who had killed and eaten not so long ago friends and acquaintances of members of our party. One could not get enough of the air, and the heat was still part of our living.
Our South Sea days are over; in a day or two we bid good-bye to the open spaces and make for the Straits and Java. As Polynesia has faded away, the sadness of all past things comes upon me—that summer is gone—those hours and those islands which spotted great blue spaces of time and place will be merely memories for autumn.
Here it is winter—a colder one than those last warm mild days of Fiji. There a great peace, a great quiet was around us. We were high above the little town of Suva, with an enormous landscape of mountains seen over the spread of the beautiful harbour. In the day the light was tropical, the sky all blue and radiant, the mountains clear and distinct. Morning and evening the light became more like a memory of home with slight visions of Scotland in between. The clouds filled up the distance with dimness, the light of morning or evening hung behind and over them as if asleep. In such a repose of nature we passed our days as if preparing for the final close.
We were treated with great kindness; we had no hard time on board the steamer that took us away reluctant in mind, and slowly in a week’s time we dropped down to this colder latitude and into civilization in full blast. We saw the sky grow clearer and more washed; the sea lost its blue; we could almost believe that we were home again as we ended our trip. We had passed some of the New Hebrides, had passed part of a day outside of Anaityum, had seen the Isle of Pines like a shadow on the horizon, had looked in vain for the smoke or light of Tanna, and at the end of the week entered the long, complicated harbour of Sydney.
Steamships, steamboats, street cars, hansom cabs, hotels, theatres, Sarah Bernhardt playing, all as before.
Good-bye to brown skins and skies and seas of impossible azure. Good-bye to life in presence of the remotest past.
“On the knees of the Ogre I pillowed my head; My feet followed safely the Path of the Dead; With my brother the Shark God I lived as a guest, And reached through the breakers the Isle of the Blest. “I bathed in the sea where the Siren still sleeps; The kiss of the Queen is still red on my lips; My hands touched the Tree with the Branches of Gold; I have lived for a season in the Order of Old.”
THE END THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
keep steadliy=> keep steadily {pg 101}
an ememy’s=> an enemy’s {pg 165}
that is has been=> that it has been {pg 345}
plantation af Atimaono=> plantation of Atimaono {pg 372}
or an odd unbrella=> or an odd umbrella {pg 444}
FOOTNOTES:
