ys ceased,
all my old vistas became memories.

The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt its
urgency no more. Beatrice and Lady Grove, my uncle and the Hardingham,
my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of swift effectual
things, became as remote as if they were in some world I had left for
ever....

IV

All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me an
expedition into the realms of undisciplined nature out of the world that
is ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of our mother that
gives you the jungle--that cold side that gives you the air-eddy I was
beginning to know passing well. They are memories woven upon a fabric
of sunshine and heat and a constant warm smell of decay. They end
in rain--such rain as I had never seen before, a vehement, a frantic
downpouring of water, but our first slow passage through the channels
behind Mordet's Island was in incandescent sunshine.

There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patched
sails and a battered mermaid to present Maud Mary, sounding and taking
thought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out knee-deep
at last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our quarter,
Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it might be within a day of us.

Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with
a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped and
dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting,
opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came
chuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and
tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs
basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only
by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the
calling of the soundings and the captain's confused shouts; but in
the night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a
thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming and
howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once
we saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three
villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and stared at
us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek and
hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great open
place, a broad lake rimm