prow for hours, watching the river, calling at times to Grisly to turn this way and that, and Hassan was uniformly genial and gentle, pulling an occasional oar, returning.

For the rest, he was clothed in coarse, white cotton, haunted the kitchen after dinner, and fared sumptuously every day. Then begged tobacco of the Howadji, and smoked it as serenely as if it were decently gotten.

At Kálabsheh we passed the Tropic of Cancer.

But are not the Tropics the synonym of Paradise? The tropics, mused the Howadji, and instantly imagination was entangled in an Indian jungle, and there struggled, fettered in glorious foliage, mistaking the stripes and eyes of a royal Bengal tiger, for the most gorgeous of tropical flowers. But escaping thence, imagination fluttered and fell, and a panorama of stony hills, a cloudless, luminous sky, but bare in brilliance, enlivened by no clouds, by no fardarting troops of birds-a narrow strip of green shoresilence, solitude and sadness revealed to the Howadji the dream-land of the tropics.

Yet there was a sunny spell in that land and scenery which held me then, and holds charmed my memory now. It was a sleep-we seemed to live it and breathe it, as the sun in Egypt. There was luminous languor in the air, as from opiate flowers, yet with only their slumber, and none of their fragrance. It seemed a failure of creation, or a creation not yet completed. Nature slept and dreamed over her work, and whoso saw her sleep, dreamed vaguely her dreams.

Puck-piloted and girdling the earth in an hour, would

not the Howadji feel that only a minute's journey of that hour was through the ripe maturity of creationthe rest, embryo-half conceived or hopeless? "The world" is only the fine focus of all the life of the world at any period; but, O Gunning in blue spectacles, picking gingerbread nuts off the Dôm palm, how small is that focus!

One Nubian day only was truly tropical. It was near Derr, the chief town, and the azure calm and brilliance of the atmosphere forced imagination to grow glorious gardens upon the shores, and to crown with forests, vine-waving, bloom-brilliant, the mountains, desert no longer, but divine as the vision-seen hill of prophets; and to lead triumphal trains of white elephants, bearing the forms and costumes of Eastern romance, and giraffes, and the priestly pomp of India, through the groves of many-natured palms that fringed the foreground of the picture. It was summer and sunshine-a very lotus day.

I felt the warm breath of the morning streaming over the Ibis, like radiance from opening eyes, even before the lids of the dawn were lifted. Then came the sun over the Arabian mountains, and the waves danced daintily in the rosy air, and the shores sloped serenely, and the river sang and gurgled against the prow, whereon sat the whiteturbaned, happy Hassan, placidly smoking, and self-involved, as if he heard all the white Nile secrets, and those of the Mountains of the Moon. The Ibis spread her white wings to the warm wooing wind, and ran over the water. Was she not well called Ibis, with her long, sharp wings,

loved of the breeze, that toys with them as she flies and fills them to fullness with speed?

The sky was cloudless and burningly rosy. To what

devote the delicious day?

What dream so dear, what book so choice, that it would satisfy the spell? Luxury of doubt and long delay! Such wonder itself was luxuryit rippled the mind with excitement, delicately as the wind kissed the stream into wavelets. Yet the Howadji looked along the shelves and the book was found, and in the hot heart of noon he had drifted far into the dreamy depths of Herman Melville's Mardi. Lost in the rich romance of Pacific reverie, he felt all around him the radiant rustling of Yillah's hair, but could not own that Polynesian peace was profounder than his own Nubian silence.

In

Mardi is unrhymed poetry, but rhythmical and measured. Of a low, lapping cadence is the swell of those sentences, like the dip of the sun-stilled, Pacific waves. more serious moods, they have the grave music of Bacon's Essays. Yet who but an American could have written them? And essentially American are they, although not singing Niagara or the Indians.

Romance or reality, asked, dazed in doubt, bewildered Broadway and approving Pall Mall. Both, erudite metropolitans, and you, O ye of the warm slippers. The Howadji is no seaman, yet can he dream the possible dreams of the mariner in the main-top of the becalmed or tradewind-wafted Pacific whaler. In those musings, mingles rare reality, though it be romantically edged, as those

palms of Ibreem, seen through the glass, are framed in wondrous gold and purple—

On, on, deeper into the Pacific calm, farther into that Southern spell! The day was divine-the hush, the dazzle, the supremacy of light, were the atmosphere of the tropics, and if toward evening, and for days after, the anxious North blustered in after her children, she could never steal that day from their memories. The apple was bitten. The Howadji had tasted the Equator.

XXXI.

Altima Chale.

WE sought the South no longer. Far flown already into a silent land, the Ibis finally furled her wings at Aboo Simbel. But far and ever farther southward, over the still river-reaches, pressed piercing thought, nor paused at Khartoum where the Nile divides, nor lingered until lost, in the Mountains of the Moon. Are they sarcastically named, those mountains, or prophetically, that when they are explored, the real moon ranges shall be determined?

Up through the ruins of the eldest land and the eldest race came two children of the youngest, and stood gazing southward into silence. Southward into the childishness of races forever in their dotage or never to grow-toward the Dinkas and the shores loved of the lotus, where they worship trees, and pull out the incisors for beauty, and where a three-legged stool is a King's throne.

The South! our synonym of love, beauty and a wide world unrealized. Lotus fragrance blows outward from that name, and steeps us in blissful dreams that bubble audibly in song from poets' lips. It is the realm of faeryfantasy and perfected passion. Dark, deep eyes gushing

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