ness of many tellers of tales
who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to
hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I
got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I
first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the
culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of
light on everything about me--and into my thoughts. It was somber enough
too--and pitiful--not extraordinary in any way--not very clear either.
No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.

"I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of
Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas--a regular dose of the East--six years
or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and
invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to
civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get
tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship--I should think the
hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got
tired of that game too.

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for
hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all
the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on
the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map
(but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When
I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I
remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The
glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in
every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some
of them, and . . . well, we won't talk about that. But there was one
yet--the biggest, the most blank, so to speak--that I had a hankering
after.

"True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled
since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be
a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream
gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it
one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,
resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its
body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the
depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a sh