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I never expect to see anything lovelier. But the thrill with which I looked at it from the steamer's deck was no greater than the thrill with which at certain moments I have seen London in rain and sunlight. Nor, were I to return to Constantinople, should I find the same city waiting for me. It was the moment that made it beautiful. Once when I was crossing the bridge over the lake in St. James's Park, I thought that Whitehall, through the lilac mist of a November afternoon, was an enchanted city out of the
Arabian Nights.
I have sought often for that city since, and have never found it. During my six months in the West Indies I had seen many lovely places. But I think I should have had just as many moments of surprised delight had I stayed in London. The sight-seeing part of travel scarcely compensates for the expense of spirit that seeing them involves.

There are pictures enough for the wanderer to bear home with him. But it is not these that are the rewards of travel. It is not these that every morning make one read enviously through the list of mails and shipping; that whenever one
hears of a ship sailing make one long to sail with it. It is not for these one travels.

The charm of travel, as of most things for that matter, is, I think, something intrinsic to itself, to be pursued as that of art for its own sake. It is not so much the places you visit as the getting there, not the end but the means that matters. In the very sailing of a liner there is a thrill for which life has no equivalent. It is its very absence of drama that is so dramatic.

You are at a dinner-party in New York. Eleven o'clock has passed. Watches are being glanced at. “Are you coming on to the Wellingtons'?” someone asks. You shake your head. “I'm sorry,” you say, “I sail to-night.” “Really,” your hostess answers, “then you'll be able to see Miss Gathers home.” And as you drive westward in the taxi, you chatter of mutual acquaintances and the party you have come from. And it is all a little shadowy, like a blurred film. You cannot believe that it is quite real, this party and this talk of parties. It is a world that exists, that will go on existing, but that in a day's time will have ceased to exist for you. In half an hour you will be on a ship. And yet you cannot believe that you are really sailing, that at last the long-awaited adventure has begun. You had expected it to be different. You cannot even believe it when you are in your state-room, when the steward is unpacking your trunk. You look incredulously at the porthole. Is it really through that circle of glass that you are to see the swaying palm trees and the golden sands of the West Indies?

Or, maybe, it is from Marseilles that you are sailing. You have been travelling all night by train. It was windy and wet in Paris, and the breakfast car, that is bright with sunshine, is full of people chatting excitedly about the glories of the Côte d'Azure, Cannes, Monaco, Antibes; names that are for months now to mean nothing to you; to you who are travelling ten thousand miles across the Atlantic through Panama to a green island in the Pacific.

And as you drive through the winding cobbled streets towards the docks, there is a curious contrast between the
excitement you are feeling and the indifference of everyone about you. There is an utter absence of all fuss. There is no commotion, no crowd upon the wharf. Your ship is just one out of a score of ships. There they are in rows, with the blackboards hung upon their gangways. “
Le ‘Louqsor' partira à
11.30
pour Pointe à Pitre.”
Just that, the bare wording of a notice. And you think of all that those words convey of time and distance. While to the officials round the dock the sailing may be a matter of mere routine, to you it is the big adventure of your life. And yet there is nothing to show it is. Is this really the way, you ask yourself, that you say “Goodbye” to everyone and everything that hitherto has comprised life to you? Is this the way you set out into the unknown? You had expected that such moments of your life would be accompanied by the conventionally appropriate trappings, some equivalent to the old fanfare of trumpets that heralded departure. And even as you wonder, you know that it is better so, that nowhere else could you get the acuteness of the thrill with which you hear the groan of a weighed anchor. It is a thrill only to be compared with the excitement of arrival; a thrill that is independent of the beauty and attractions of the place that you are bound for; that is great or little in accordance with the length of the journey you have made. Æsthetically, San Francisco is at its loveliest as you come to it from the Pacific, through the Golden Gate, but the first sight of it to the traveller from Honolulu will not produce the same tightening of the muscles round the heart that you get when you reach it by ferry boat from Oakland Pier, after seven days of the Atlantic and four days of train across a continent. In the same way that one's enjoyment of a meal depends on the amount of time that has elapsed since one ate one's last, so does one's excitement on reaching a new place depend on the measure of effort that one's arrival there has cost.

I shall never forget the excitement of my second arrival at Tahiti. In the course of six and a half weeks we had only stopped three times and for a few hours. For twenty days we had not seen land; if I had been told that we should have to
spend another two weeks on board I should have, I think, gone mad. For days we had been watching the flag move forward on the map, calculating how long it would take to reach Papeete, wondering whether by some happy hazard of wind and current, we might not arrive ahead of time, suspecting that in all probability we should be hours late.

It all seemed worth it, though, on the day that we arrived, We were to reach Papeete shortly after one. And at half-past five I was on the bridge peering ahead through the dissolving dusk. Slowly the sky brightened; slowly the sun came out of the sea behind us. Eagerly I looked ahead. Was that a cloud there, or a line of mountains? It was so faint and shadowy. Was it really the outline of the Diadem, or just a cloud that shortly would dislimn? And when, at last, I realised that that lilac shadow was not a cloud, but was in very truth—Tahiti—that moment paid and repaid the score of those long six weeks.

That is the thing about travel. It is not so much that one sees the world through it as that one comes to a whole new series of sensations that are to be won to nohow else. For, in point of actual worldliness, the sailor, though he has touched at so many corners of the world, knows little of it

§

I have travelled, I suppose, in all on something like thirty ships, varying in size from the vast Atlantic ferry boats to the little trading steamers that coast round the lagoons of the New Hebrides; I have seen something of the sailor's life, and, however much the actual conditions governing it may change, in its essentials it remains the same.

We listen enviously at first to the sailor's account of the seas he has crossed and the lands that he has visited, but in actual fact he sees nothing of those far countries except their coastline. He rarely remains for longer than five days at any port. There is work to be done upon the ship; there is no time to go far inland. He has only a few hours at his disposal. He has no friends ashore. As likely as not the language is foreign to him. The cafés are the only places that he can go
to; there is not much difference between one café and another.

“My word, but I could tell you some stories about this place!” said once to me a certain companionable second steward, as we were strolling down the main thoroughfare of Manzanillo, that most lugubrious of all the lugubrious coffee ports which stretch along the Mexican coastline between Mazatlan and Acapulco. It is a one-street affair with a couple of cafés, a store or two, a shambling hotel, and the kind of dance place where only a fool would flash a ten-dollar bill; where everyone carries a revolver on his hip, and the evening is as likely as not to end with the sound of bullets.

“I could tell you some stories about this place,” said the second steward. “Seven whole weeks I spent here once.”

He was a Peruvian, half-native and half-American, with a quick wit and a twinkling eye, who had spent thirty-five years coasting between Seattle and Valparaiso. He had had his share of improbable experiences. But even so the prospect of listening to his confession did not fill me with the curiosity that two years earlier it would have done. I knew in advance the details of that story.

There had been a heavy night, with a boat to sail at six; there had been drinking, there had been a quarrel. And at half-past seven he had found himself in a back alley, his pockets empty, his comrades gone, and not another ship due for seven weeks. He had reported to his Consul, who listened wearily to a wearily familiar tale, and promised him twenty-five cents a day till succour came. Then there had been a girl.

“As fine a girl, sir,” he would insist, “as you would be likely to find anywhere along the Lincoln highway. I cried my eyes out when I said good-bye to her. I swore I'd come back; and the things I promised to send her when we got to San Francisco! I meant to send them. I swear I did. But you know what sailors are. You go ashore with six months' pay, within six hours there's not a penny left of it; and there's nothing for you to do but to find another ship and sign on quickly.”

The land life of the sailor is narrow, uninteresting, and, in
the true sense of the word, unromantic. It is, however, an inessential part of the sailor's life. You can get no true picture of his real life by watching him in a ‘dive' in Colon, or in the chop sueys that are north of the West India Docks. He is a seaman and his life is on his ship.

At sea he is a very different person, simple and direct, leading a healthy, pleasant, monotonous existence. His life is centred in his ship and his companions; he has no part in that which constitutes the life of the normal landsman. He rarely reads a newspaper, politics mean nothing to him; his conversation is not a fabric of murder trials and football results. He is concerned with currents and cargoes; with the day's run, with the changing winds, with the infinite variety of the sea, with the interests that compose the sum of a communal and self-contained existence.

He has simplified life into two things, his ship and his home. Home does not mean to him a fabric of complicated relations, but two or three people—his parents, his wife, his children. A sailor, for all they may talk about the “wife in every port,” is an extremely domesticated person. He has no opportunity of knowing more than a very few people intimately, and his life is bound up in those few. The excitement of arriving at port is more often the thrill over a mail than the prospect of an hilarious evening.

We picture the sailor's life in terms of adventure and romance. We think of the sailor as someone who has seen life widely; but in point of fact there is no class of person who is less familiar with what is held ordinarily to constitute life. In consequence, he retains that freshness, almost amounting to an innocence of outlook, that is his particular and peculiar charm.

§

And it is for this reason, I believe—namely, that the reward of travel is not the seeing of certain accepted beauties but the discovery of a series of special and particular sensations—that so many travellers will tell you that the biggest emotion that they have ever had is the crossing of the Panama Canal. The
passing of those locks, that stepping in a few hours from one ocean to another, which is the stepping from a known into an unknown world, symbolises the whole spirit of adventure that lures men to travel. And here, too, there is the drama of the undramatic. There is no fuss. It is very quiet and orderly and efficient. There is no shouting, no display. The great gates close behind you; noiselessly the water fills the lock. Inch by inch you rise till the figures that were on a level with the deck are feet below it; till another gate swings open and the traction engines begin to climb; and once again there is the noiseless flow of water; and once again the figures on the side that were above you are at your level and then are passed. It is so quiet that you scarcely realise the immensity of the adventure; not even when you are in the Gatun Lake and see to right and left of you the stumps of the flooded forests; not even when you drift slowly past Mira-flores towards San Miguel, towards Balboa and beyond Balboa, to the slow waters of the Pacific.

If ever I write a travel-story it shall begin in Panama, with the first sighting after three weeks of the Atlantic of the breakwater of Colon. And as the boat rises slowly the hero will feel that he is being lifted out of the world of commonplace experience into the rarefied atmosphere of romance. To a love-story, the return by the Canal would give the perfect curtain. As in the first chapter the approach to Colon had symbolised the spirit of romance, so now would the return through Panama symbolise its death. As the hero looks behind him at those closing gates and upwards to the heightening shore and before him to the low Atlantic, he realises in one spasm of revelation all that he is saying good-bye to. He is descending from the heights of poetic living to the prosaic level of mere livelihood.

It is at Plymouth that the traveller should land. The cool green of its hills will mean England to him after the gaudy tropics. And it is through landscape that contains the heart of England that the train will hurry him to London. You have not the same feeling of home-coming at Southampton. Certainly you have not if you arrive there in the early morning by the night boat from Havre.

The
Pellerin
had docked early in the afternoon. Eldred had caught the special train to Paris, and as I wandered round the streets, or sat in a café reading the
Continental Daily Mail,
I had the feeling of being back and yet not back. It was an impression that persisted. On the small Channel boat there was the restlessness of interrupted travel. There was shouting and a clattering of trunks. The cabins were small—the kind of cabin that is meant to be slept no more than a night in. It was by European labels that the suit-cases of the man who slept in the next bunk were covered. Next morning the familiar platform was busy with the familiar bustle: with the familiar faces draggled after a restless night and a hurried dressing. I could not believe that it was from the tropics and a six months' absence that I was returning. I felt that, like all these other, I was coming back from a week-end in Paris.