ater the red and
green lights of the steamers move about in irregular tracks. The
booming, mournful call of these steamers, like the lowing of a cow for
her lost calf, goes on for ever. There are times in the desert when
the coyote and the jackal are silent; on forlorn coasts in the hours
before the first of dawn the seagulls cease their screaming; but these
voices are never silent, calling, circling, and cawing, calling around
the City of Unrest. Different notes they sound--the angry scream of
the steam siren, the deep boom of the incoming ocean liner, and the
note one hears oftenest--a mournful, lost wail, as of a damned soul
calling out, "Custos, quid de nocte?" "Custos, quid de nocte?" The
feverish hours pass troublously, but there is no response in the night
of the City of Unrest.

Now a great change has come over the scene; the moon has been
curtained off by a heavy mass of clouds, and its light is shut off
from the water. The lights of the city shine out with increased
distinctness; the moonlight that whitened the sides of the buildings
now has left them black masses of vague shadow, and all at once one
gets the impression of looking down into an inverted firmament studded
with countless stars of as various magnitudes as in the heavens, from
the bright electric arc-lights to tiny gaslights; and from this height
of over 400 feet one gets the impression, familiar to those who have
looked at the world from a balloon, that the rim of the horizon rises
all round. "Around the circle of the desert spreads," but the desert
now is of the cloud-covered sky, and far as the eye can reach are the
stars of this great city, and now through that firmament of stars
there is a dark path in an unilluminated Milky Way which marks the
course of the river.

As one looks down from here and listens to the combination of
throbbing sounds that come up from below, there is a certain
impressiveness in the thought of being in the centre of such focused
activity. One seems to be pressing the ear close to the heart of a
great country. I wonder what that other city looked like from the
pinnacle of whose temple He looked down on the other great cities that
had their day? What Carthage looked like? The present edition of Rome
and Paris and London, and Pekin from the Imperial pagodas on the top
of Coal Hill, I have looked down on at night, but none of them is like
this. From the Capitol Rome lies quietly wrapped in the memories of
past greatnes