ked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's
bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked for its name. "Alboran," he
said, very quietly, without looking at it, as though keeping something
back. He said no more. But while that strange glimmer was on the sea I
watched it; I have learned nothing since of Alboran; and so the memory of
that brief sight of a strange rock is as though once I had blundered on a
dreadful secret which the men who knew it preferred to keep.

But there is a West Indian Island which for me is the best in the seas,
because the memory of it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the
tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main was as soundless as a dream.
It was but an apparition of land. It might have been no more than an
unusually vivid recollection of a desire which had once stirred the
imagination of a boy. Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared
to believe that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance
of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our
course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It
could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that
a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew
higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It
_was_ a dream come true. Yet even now, as I shall not have that landfall
again, I have a doubt that waters could be of the colours which were
radiant about that island, that rocks could be of rose and white, that
trees could be so green and aromatic, and light--except of the
Hesperides, which are lost--so like the exhilarating life and breath of
the prime. A doubt indeed! For every whisper one hears to-day deepens the
loom of a gigantic German attack.

IV. Travel Books

JANUARY 19, 1918. What long hours at night we wait for sleep! Sleep will
not come. A friend, who grows more like a sallow congestion of scorn than
a comfortable companion, warned me yesterday, when I spoke of the end of
the War, that it might have no end. He said that we could not escape our
fate. Our star, I gathered, was to receive a celestial spring-cleaning.
There would be bonfires of litter. We had become impeded with the rubbish
of centuries of wise and experienced statecraft, and we had hardly more
than begun to get rid of it. A renaissance with a vengeance! Youth was in
revolt against the aged and the dead.

But what an idea to look at when