vastness of the
city. I will go down and see the people whom I know more intimately than
so many of my friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more. But my
eyes fall on a piece of porcelain and I smell the acrid odours of China.
I am borne in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields,
or else I skirt a tree-clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they
trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and
mysterious, I hear the deep sound of a monastery bell. In the streets of
Peking there is a motley crowd and it scatters to allow passage to a
string of camels, stepping delicately, that bring skins and strange
drugs from the stony deserts of Mongolia. In England, in London, there
are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and
the light is so bleak that your heart sinks, but then you can look out
of your window, and you see the coconut trees crowded upon the beach of
a coral island. The sand is silvery and when you walk along in the
sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it.
Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to-do, and the surf beats
ceaselessly against the reef. Those are the best journeys, the journeys
that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your
illusions.

But there are people who take salt in their coffee. They say it gives it
a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way
there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the
inevitable disillusionment which you must experience on seeing them
gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and
you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that
beauty can give you. It is like the weakness in the character of a great
man which may make him less admirable but certainly makes him more
interesting.

Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu. It is so far away from Europe, it
is reached after so long a journey from San Francisco, so strange and so
charming associations are attached to the name, that at first I could
hardly believe my eyes. I do not know that I had formed in my mind any
very exact picture of what I expected, but what I found caused me a
great surprise. It is a typical western city. Shacks are cheek by jowl
with stone mansions; dilapidated frame houses stand next door to smart
stores with plate glass windows; electric cars rumble noisily along the
streets; and motors