. It
must be experienced to be realised, that dead silence; when lying on
the ground at night the sound of one's heart-beats or the breathing of
one's horse, tethered yards away, alone tells one that the sense of
hearing is not lost. It must be experienced to be loved, that wonder
of a silent world, where the Spirit of Solitude in his own domain for
ever almost palpably seems to brood with finger on pressed lips. It
is the contrast with the scene that lies below me that forcibly
recalls these nights in the desert. Now, as I write, I am at the
Antipodes, and focus points of contrast in every sense to these
scenes; the same moon that shines on that far-off desert is the only
thing in common.

The city of New York is in the form of a wedge, the point of the wedge
being the down-town end, a great black mass that now looks driven into
the moonlit water. Down here, as if with sheer weight of pressure of
crowding humanity, the houses seem driven upward. There being not
enough room on the end of the wedge for the people, they are forced
upwards for room, as one would squeeze paint from an artist's tube.
They rise up in tall, irregular-shaped shafts of various heights, as a
child might stand its long toy bricks on end anyhow. As I write I am
looking down from the thirtieth story of one of the highest, feeling
as if I had been "set on the pinnacle of the Temple" (of Mammon?).
The great city lies below me, but though it is night it does not
appear to lie in repose. If it sleeps, it is a restless, troubled
sleep. The air is vocal with many noises that come up from below as an
exhalation; white flames of steam wave from the tops of buildings
below me. Up here on this giddy height a hot wind of the upper air is
blowing, and a vibrating, murmurous throbbing pulsates through the
building itself. This latter is caused by the elevators, those veins
and arteries of the structure, and their motion must never cease or
else a clot of humanity would be left marooned in the upper storeys.
Across the river on the west side a row of lights are moving in one
direction, and alongside them a row moving in the opposite, like ants
at work. These are the trolly-cars crossing Brooklyn Bridge. North and
south, to the sound of a jangling rattle, the trams on the Elevated
are moving, and along the streets the trolly-cars, with their booming
note, which crescendoes up the scale with increasing speed and
diminuendoes with the slackening of it. Out on the w