n Francisco, for I knew that Chinamen had been there, too, and one
of them might be alive; and how, one calm day, the 15th or the 16th
April, I, sitting by the wheel in the mid-Pacific, suddenly saw a great
white hole that ran and wheeled, and wheeled and ran, in the sea, coming
toward me, and I was aware of the hot breath of a reeling wind, and then
of the hot wind itself, which deep-groaned the sound of the letter _V_,
humming like a billion spinning-tops, and the _Speranza_ was on her
side, sea pouring over her port-bulwarks, and myself in the corner
between deck and taffrail, drowning fast, but unable to stir; but all
was soon past and the white hole in the sea, and the hot spinning-top of
wind, ran wheeling beyond, to the southern horizon, and the _Speranza_
righted herself: so that it was clear that someone wished to destroy me,
for that a typhoon of such vehemence ever blew before I cannot think;
and how I came to San Francisco, and how I burned it, and had my sweets:
for it was mine; and how I thought to pass over the great
trans-continental railway to New York, but would not, fearing to leave
the _Speranza_, lest all the ships in the harbour there should be
wrecked, or rusted, and buried under sea-weed, and turned unto the sea;
and how I went back, my mind all given up now to musings upon the earth
and her ways, and a thought in my soul that I would return to those deep
places of the Filipinas, and become an autochthone--a tree, or a snake,
or a man with snake-limbs, like the old autochthones: but I would not:
for Heaven was in man, too: Earth and Heaven; and how as I steamed round
west again, another winter come, and I now in a mood of dismal
despondencies, on the very brink of the inane abyss and smiling idiotcy,
I saw in the island of Java the great temple of Boro Budor: and like a
tornado, or volcanic event, my soul was changed: for my recent studies
in the architecture of the human race recurred to me with interest, and
three nights I slept in the temple, examining it by day. It is vast,
with that look of solid massiveness which above all characterises the
Japanese and Chinese building, my measurement of its width being 529
feet, and it rises terrace-like in six stories to a height of about 120
or 130 feet: here Buddhist and Brahmin forms are combined into a most
richly-developed whole, with a voluptuousness of tracery that is simply
intoxicating, each of the five off-sets being divided up into an
innumerabl