Chapter XXIII

Sickness and a Masai raid befell us early in our adventure. The porters suffered from the first, but in the raid all alike. An Arab caravan-man was killed, four negroes were wounded, Sir Charles had a flesh wound from a flung spear, and I a rifle-ball through the left arm, breaking the bone. The Masai, finding us too strong, left as suddenly as they had come. We made camp, buried the Arab, and stayed to heal the sick and the hurt in a place out of a fairy-book, so strange and beautiful it was. With my wound I had more than a touch of fever. Ahasuerus and Maxwell nursed me and John Sydney set the bone and helped me up and out. This was the end for me of illness. I came out of it seasoned, and the rest of Africa gave me only momentary hurts, though many an adventure when it seemed that death or maiming was nigh.

We recovered the sick and moved on. By degrees the first novelty, beautiful, with a dash of terror, passed. There set in routine interest, routine toil.

We were not primarily an exploring expedition. Exploration of much of the route taken had been done for us. But it fell to us to lighten certain obscurities that overhung affluents of the two great streams. Nor had our enterprise political color. Yet, where we lived days or weeks with savage tribes, and some of these not at all without glimmerings of things to be, we gave, I suppose, seed-ideas. At one place, on high land, we met a tribe that was assuredly lifting. It had a king who was, in his way, an Alfred. This man learned more than one thing that would, in the long run, serve him.... The expedition's official intent was to increase knowledge of life in various forms, to read the rocks, make a great collection of plants, draw and photograph wild, moving life, learn all we might for zoölogy, anthropology, ethnology. We were to put down in black and white observation, experience, deduction. We were to bring back to Europe some valuable journal--journal made at last of journals, half a dozen contributing.

Maxwell was no journalist. He deputed it to me, and I kept our common record. But, besides this, I began, beyond Victoria Nyanza, a record and comment of my own, written after my own fashion. In the weeks that we waited where Congo enters Atlantic, and upon the England-bound ship, I put this in order, and it became _Letters from Africa_. The idea of the _African Dream_ came to me under Ruwenzori, but I did not write it for three years.

At times this expedition tasted beauty and marvel to the height; at times it wrestled with dangers, trials, and fears. At times it met gross weariness, or stumbled in tunnels of anxiety with a feeling of all Africa caving in upon it. Sickness visited us, and now and again death.

Ere we were two months upon our way Philip Grantham died from some poisonous thing.

We felt grief, we felt awe, he had been so bright, vigorous, like a Greek boy. Sir Charles stood, sat, moved, with lips so pressed together that there was but one dark line. We buried the shell out of which was gone the young master. We raised a little cairn over it, we stayed there by it two days and nights. We marched on, Sir Charles very stern-looking, but himself, with a will to keep his cloud of sorrow in his own sky.

That night we made camp in a sandy country, above a trickle of water, with a sighing wind about us, blowing, twisting, the smoke from our fire. The white men's tents were pitched together, the Arabs' lay a little apart, the many negroes couched about a fire with their heads almost in the embers. Each night two white men shared the watch. One slept till the dark was half gone, when his fellow waked him and himself slept. The trader Robinson and I parted this night between us. He slept upon the sand, gleaming under a half-moon. I sat and listened to the wind and all it talked about. The moon traveled westward, the camp lay still. I thought that in one place I saw something move, and I went softly that way, to find that it was a dwarf tree stirring in the wind. Returning, as I passed Sir Charles's tent I heard him groan.

I sat near the sleeping trader, and I looked toward Sir Charles, and I wished--I willed--I tried to help him.

If indeed, and I believed it, we were members one of another, then he was in me and I in him. And the "dead" youth, the invisible youth--so visible to the mind's eye, so penetrated by the mind's touch, so felt for and felt with, understood, warmed with liking, recognized as hardly had he been before--what perversity to say that he was wholly gone! He had not gone--he was here--in that sea wherein all we bathed, in that organism where death and separateness faded out.

I sat upon the sand, above the watercourse beneath the moon. I drew myself together, concentering, until the spark came, until the vibration changed, until there were long, swift light and warmth--no forms, but fluidity, energy, radiance. I was aware that if I had been strong enough to go farther, I might remake forms--make them fairer, even, subtler, less destructible, greater. But I was not strong enough--nothing like strong enough. I tried to direct the waves of assurance, of comfort. I wished him in the dark tent to feel them. I tried to soothe as I would have tried to soothe my own hurt hand or arm, as I would have tried to comfort and recover myself. He was myself, his hurt my hurt. That was the thing that I believed with passion of all things. I tried to bring the living youth alive in him. If there was _continuum_, if there was _plenum_, we were all one. I tried to make the underneath flowing rise in him, bring the strongest comfort. I did not go out to him; he was in myself. I found him there; I tried to make the true blood flow in a numbed part of myself--and that self was not just Michael Forth. Michael Forth was but a fiber of that self. All the small "I's" of earth were but surface colorations of that Identity.

The perception--the action--if action there were--could not be long sustained. I had tried from a fourth dimension to engender light and warmth in one who suffered. I did not know--I do not know--if there was success--though I think that there was some success--filmy enough, undoubtedly.... The inner sphere closed again from view. The moon shone, the wind sighed, the water murmured. It was time to wake the trader.

We looked upon Victoria Nyanza and headwaters of Nile. We lived for a time beside a village in western Uganda, clean, with banana-groves, inhabited by a Bahima folk, tall and handsome. We were plentifully provided with objects of barter, and they brought us in return what we needed. The country was most beautiful, high, and healthful. Here were cattle and game in herds, and many a strange great quadruped. The native chiefs and strong men, the women, the old men, and the children showed themselves friendly. They came by the paths that were everywhere, a faint reticulation over all the land, to our camp, or we trod the same lines to the village. We sat under the trees that they favored. Llewellyn and Ferraro more especially throve here. Llewellyn had picture-books which he showed the Bahima; he told them stories like an old Welsh bard. He had the gift of discrimination. I would watch his bright eye dart and fix upon some one member of the bronze circle. "There's one who can tell a story! Come ye forth, friend, there, and unpack us tale or ballad!" Two out of three times Llewellyn succeeded. The glories of the Bahima jetted forth. Meantime the Welshman, in the shadow of some one's broad shoulder, drew out pocket tablet and pencil and fell to transcribing. He and Ferraro had great knowledge of peoples and types.

We had in Africa strenuous hours, and again hours unoccupied. In some of the latter I put myself to school to Llewellyn and Ferraro. I learned much from them. I heard corroborated that which I had always guessed, the profound unity of the human family. And out of the unity, that stem, that vine, but never detached from it, the multitude of branches. Some were wildings and some garden and orchard and vineyard glories--all in proportion, it seemed to me, as they kept knowledge of the fire and sap of the whole. I learned much of great drama from the Welshman and the Italian's lore--strange tales of the divers leaves and buds, twigs and branches of the ash Yggdrasil.

But it was with Mannheim, the naturalist, that I roamed farthest. This man, twenty years my elder, son of a Jewish rabbi, born in Hamburg, raised in London, had broken from cities into gardens, into fields and lane sides, into forests. The king who knew alike the cedar and the hyssop of the wall might have found somewhat of himself in this mind. Mannheim had a tall, thin figure, soft, curled hair upon head and chin, a hooked nose, eyes now keen and now deep, still, and inward-looking. Sometimes for days I went with him, in and out of Uganda forests. We took Ahasuerus with us and three or four Bahima men. At times Mannheim talked about himself, his youth and hard schooling and emerging purposes. "Each one finds what he seeks," said Mannheim, "and each one seeks what he is able to find."

"Even if he seek the ultimate circle and the original fountain?"

"Even that. But he must give himself time. As you say, Rome was not built in a day.... Certainly the new Jerusalem is not built in a day."

We sat beneath an acacia and looked at lilies in an arm of marsh-water. I repeated aloud:

"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,
Bring me my spear! oh, clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

"Who said that?"

"Blake."

We sat silent for a time. Then said Mannheim: "The next century is to be the psychic century. _Fin de siècle_ they call this piece of time; nineteen hundred will begin to listen to a still, small voice."

"You mean that the conscious subjective--and, correspondingly, the objective--will widen its borders?"

"Yes. We shall begin to use nerve and muscle that have been forming."

"What are the first movements of the new child?"

"They have great variety. Naturally. At first the freedom seems wholly interior."

"Old self is very gloomy and insists to larger self that it is mistaken."

"Yes. All kinds of idle fears. Babes learning to walk--the chair and mother's arms too far away!"

"Perseverance and courage?"

"Yes. It's worth all boldness."

I looked at the lilies by the reeds. They were very fair; they trembled on the dark water; they seemed lit from beneath, sapphire, exquisite. The reeds grew musical instruments and living green and of a vivid grace. It was a flash of transfiguration. I knew these at times. They came and went, rifts of heaven, which then closed. I spoke. "All that you call psychical--double-strengthened memory, imagination at white heat, intuition that is a long reasoning process flashed together, response to all manner of stimuli that once were not noticed--all that is by no means all of it. There is no rest short of the conscious Totality!"

"I agree," said Mannheim. "All that we can now conceive, or that we can conceive to-morrow, is conceived but to be lost in greater light. All the same, take what we can now do, and let it bring forth what wonder it will! It is first steps. After walking comes running; after running, flying; after flying we may begin to look toward that wide home which is omnipresence." He sat silent; then: "I recognized you as one of the new children. There are more of these children now than used to be. Presently there will be many--another race. Then will the mass of things begin to change."

One of the men brought him a strange flower. Mannheim studied it, touching, handling, with the naturalist's respect and understanding.

"I have not seen one like it," I said.

"No," he answered. "It has fellows, but they are rare. It is emerging from a class. See, here and here, how it differs.... But all that it is doing is simply using its powers."

"There's a thing," I said, "in Dante's _Purgatory_ that struck me sharp and quick when I read it as a boy. There's a round of the mountain where the souls lie prostrate with face pressed and eyes blinded against rock and dust. They have lain there, each one, very long. '_My soul hath cleaved unto the dust._'... One of them stirs, rises upon hands, rises to knees, stands, and goes. The mountain thrills and gives forth a cry of praise. Presently to Dante and Virgil appears the shade risen from that rock like Christ from the grave. They converse, and the soul--it is one Statius--tells them that the mountain trembles and acclaims when any spirit among those prostrate ones who have been covetous only of earth, of metal, and of dust, and all the dream and cozenage of life

feels itself
So purified, that it may rise, or move
For rising....
Purification, by the will alone
Is proved, that free to change society
Seizes the soul rejoicing in her will....
Free wish for happier clime.

"So Statius. Then says Virgil:

"Now I see the net
That takes ye here; and how the toils are loosed."

"Yes," said Mannheim. "I hold that to be true through every order."

With the flower still in his hand we went back to camp. Two or three days after this we were out at the foot of a fairly high mountain, in a grove of bamboo. It was a grove of strange and rich suggestion; fairy pillars, fairy arcades, smoothness, straightness, jewel-light and fine, sere whispering. After a while we rested, lying on dry, clean earth. Outside the bamboo the men with us sat under a breadfruit-tree and played some game with bits of bone. We saw them brokenly, glintingly, through the forest of bronze-green jointed stalks.

Said the naturalist: "There's a kind of experimenting that must go on all the time if we are to get anywhere. Laboratory work like any other--patient trials and then patient trials again. If once in a hundred times there comes fluorescence--results--we are glad and praise the America beyond the foam.... You get into wide past and wide present easily?"

"Yes."

"And you travel within, as one calls it? You say, 'I am in my birthplace'--or, 'I am in New York'--or London--or maybe Canton or Calcutta?"

"Yes."

"You use all your knowledge, sense of probabilities, associative power, and so forth, and--sometimes palely, sometimes less palely--comprehend, comprise, are things, situations, movements, events, and trains of these?"

"Yes. I go many places within myself, and I do many things. But the reality feeling is sometimes very weak."

"The reality will increase.... Let us experiment.... I have been in America. I have been to your Niagara Falls. Have you been there?"

"Yes--long ago."

"Can you recall the cataract? The rush of the river down, the thunder, and the upflung churned water--"

"Yes."

"Then recall it now with all the energy you can! I will do likewise. See if we can meet and double the perception. Sometimes it is possible. It is worth the trying."

The bamboo grove held us as in some magic grot, cool and dim, stately, whispering. I shut my eyes and sat still, breathing lightly. The inner man, into whose hands all places run, gave heed to Niagara.

It was here, the roar and the intense, deep, swift, utter push of the river over the brim! The ground trembled; I knew again the smell of the mass, the chill, the thundering fall, the outflung enormous spray. Niagara! Very well, it was here, and in a high degree of reality. I had put my strength to bringing it here. There was the sense, as always when a thing like this was done, of a widened brain, of a changed breathing, of a lifted inner firmament. I held Niagara in presence. But Mannheim? That needed another strength. I put forth energy of recognition.... I felt him. For one instant the two Niagaras roared together.... Immense sound, motion, light--all significance doubled--sense of river where had been brooks, sense of eagle where had been eaglets, sense of triumphing, outfilling life, memory, knowledge--the subjective brain, the objective brain, great planets where had been lesser ones--everywhere a changed dynamic.... The instant sank and passed. There fell diminution, paling, slowing.... Here was only the single Niagara, and it seemed a wraith beside what had been. It disappeared. Two men sat in Africa in a grove of bamboo.

Said Mannheim: "That was a fleeting synthesis of two. Conceive, will you, how it will be when we are all one!"