From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier Book Reviews

From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier by Henry Duff Traill Book Summary

It is two hours since we picked our way between Scylla and Charybdis—no such mighty difficult feat to the navigators of to-day as it so strangely seems to have been to the sailors of the ancient world—and settled down for our two days further run to our Egyptian port. Reggio and Messina have long since disappeared; the spurs of Etna, which almost challenged comparison with their parent height as we were issuing from the Straits, have dwindled into knolls and hillocks, and for well-nigh an hour the great bare cone has stood out black and solitary against the deep orange of the western sky. Sicily itself has become one with its "mountain of old name;" there is nothing to be seen of the romantic island but its giant volcano, nothing left to recall any one of its clustering multitude of classic legends, save only the earliest and sternest of them all. The home of nymph and shepherd, of sacred fountain and love-sick river god, has vanished, and the everlasting prison of the buried Titan alone remains. But that grim donjon glooms at our departing vessel for long. It is still faintly visible when the pale lilac of the sky has melted into a still paler blue, when the flame-tipped purple of the sunset-wrack has become a lustreless brown, when the silver sheen of twilight has faded from the darkening waters. It is a race between the mists and the night to hide it first, and it would be hard to say which wins. Dusk or the sea-haze does at last hide it, leaving visible only the glimmering phantom of the Italian mainland, which itself, also, is soon swallowed up in the night. Then the moon glides, like, into her great throne-room of the heavens; the evening star calls up its slow and timid followers into the presence; the night-breeze begins to marshal her ermine-clad court of clouds; and then—why then the ineffable poetry of the hour and the scene is broken by the unspeakable prose of the dinner bell.
Life, as Carlyle observed at a moment when he was able to contemplate it undisturbed by dyspepsia, is a "conflux of two eternities." The sea and sky, when the last streak of land has disappeared, become a conflux of two virtual infinities. Life on the sea, therefore, being spent amid a combination of illimitables—at a representation of the Absolute, "supported," so to speak, "by the whole strength of the company"—one might well expect the spirit of man to be answerably affected by the solemnity of its surroundings. The correct thing for it to do, I believe, is "to beat against the bars of its fleshly prison," and to "long for absorption in the all-embracing Universe." Our muddy vesture of decay should grossly close us in no longer. A starry night on deck should speak to us more eloquently than it spoke to Lorenzo and Jessica on their moonlit bank, and the quiring of the spheres to the young-eyed cherubim should be audible above the wash of the flying waters, and perhaps even the throb of the engines.
As a matter of fact, however, there is no situation in which the spirit of man seems more eminently contented with its corporeal captivity than at this moment when it should be struggling for its freedom. The only result of these communings of his with the Infinite seems to be to magnify immensely his interest in the infinitesimal. Space, Time, Matter, and the Void, the One and the Many—all these vast and imposing abstractions appear to efface themselves in his imagination. As to Space, he is only conscious of it in its limitations while he is dressing. Time shrinks to an arbitrary though convenient method of computing the intervals between meals. Towards the close of each such period he becomes temporarily conscious of the Void; and in the perpetually recurring struggle with these repasts he may perhaps find a symbol of the eternal antithesis between the One and the Many, and of the eternal effort of the Many to merge itself in the One. The human mind, in short, instead of expanding in this transcendental company, contracts. Its emotions, at a moment when they might be expected to range the universe, assume their most egotistically personal shape; and when its intellectual and spiritual powers ought—in common decency, one might almost say—to predominate, its primitive, even its savage, instincts are supreme. Man, or, at any rate, average man, approaches as near to the condition of mechanism as, perhaps, it is possible for him to approach without actually becoming a machine. Human life is reduced to its purely animal processes, and the great facts and forces of Nature exist for the sole purpose of ministering to them. The sun rises that you may bask in its rays; the sea breeze blows for the disinterested encouragement of your appetite; the moon and stars are to look at while you smoke before "turning in." That the sea may lull and rock you to sleep is without doubt the final cause of its cradle-like movement, and the sufficient explanation of its soothing sound. You say to yourself as you sink to slumber that the ingenious Dr. Paley could not have anywhere found a more triumphant proof of his great doctrine of design in creation.

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