conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed between
tumults past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as far
above the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard
campaign surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they
brought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and
seemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar
twilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally,
one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliage
and the voice of those far waters for its music.

The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt being
abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen
mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury
and stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden
death; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and
sustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half
oppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were
drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly
by and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in an
instant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to the
verge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrows
and labyrinthine passages of torn rocks, until, the last promontory
turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granite
barrier and bounded far into still water fringed with trees of
profoundest shadow. We put in to shore, for this stage of our journey
was over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road. But
the influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep us
long silent, as if awed by the passing of ancient Vedic gods.

I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coasting
voyages in restful ships that seemed built to sail Maeander; the
touchings at old wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples where
Herodotus would have loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes of
Adam's Peak; the meditations amid the ruins of Anaradhapura and
Pollanarrua, ancient homes of kings, now stripped of every glory but
that of these sonorous names--such are the records of every traveller,
and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty pens. A month of
wandering within the fringe of civilization would be closed by a last