ere's always been
Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I
guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.
It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're
running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good
as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart
out of you...."

It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very
vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pass away
northward and I listened to his talk.

"I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the
skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's
just the next ruin,' I thought."

I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is
indistinct.

We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until
he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all
the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and
the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant
centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than
the countless beginnings that have gone before.

"There's Science," said I a little doubtfully.

"At Cnossus there they had Daedalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Daedalus!
He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't
steel they had brass. We're too conceited about our little modern
things."

Sec. 9

I found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from Europe
to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the
ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and
mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient
destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,--the canal has
changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism,
noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out
into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the
shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great
rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no
European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked
ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon
wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the
white clothes appear. Everyone casts o