ven me niggardly to leave
Tripoli, and my ship's boatmen pointed out the urgent need to supply a
certain rowboat in the bay with that morsel of paper. To lose that tiny
document would have a shocking result, for a warship was in the bay to
support the rowboat. We passed that warship. Some day a hilarious
traveller will tear his document into fragments, and that warship will
fire at him, and sink. The system here, a mere tabulation of fear and
suspicion, those reflexes of evildoers who have the best of reasons to
be jealous of their neighbours, is protective exclusiveness in its
perfect flower, and perhaps it would be better to be really dead than
to live under it as a warm, law-abiding corpse.

I should guess that, with a slight magnification to make the object
plainer, there are three soldiers to each worker in North Africa. On
from Oran the gaudy fellow in uniform has been very conspicuous, the
most leisured and prosperous of the inhabitants, and one came
unwillingly to the conclusion that it is more profitable to smoke
cigarettes in a country than to grow corn in it. As for Tripoli, its
uniformed protectors hide the protected; but perhaps its natives have
learned how to live by killing one another. It is possible I have not
divined the more subtle ways of God's providence.

Tripoli, like other towns oh these shores, looks as though it were
sloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of the
town is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age would
account for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold,
haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stucco
and plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and is
used as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, and the monument to
Marcus Aurelius has an odour of garlic; but it need not be supposed
that that was specially repugnant to me. How could the white marble of
Marcus, to say nothing of a warmer philosophy no less austere, be
acceptable to our senses unless translated, with a familiar odour of
garlic, by modern greengrocers? I shall think more of Tripoli of
Barbary in future, when looking back at it through a middle-aged pipe,
when the chains have got me at last.

_January 1907._

II. The Call

When the train left me at Clayton Station, the only passenger to
alight, its hurried retreat down the long straight of converging
metals, a rapidly diminishing cube, seemed to be meas