ut of luck by
skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the
boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away,
and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened and
strengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life,
following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and
disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and
mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts
and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a
triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling
kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in
that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the
creative word had been spoken only five minutes before. We, and all
this, had just come. I wanted to laugh and cheer.

8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a
chart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing their
attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not
allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered
governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to
tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests.
But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world
beneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _Leman
Bank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_,
and the _Great Dogger Bank_! Strange, that indefinable implication of a
word! I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to
a grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and a
brother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East." I
turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.
Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers
whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was
wakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it,
even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me. Nor
can I now. It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the right
system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from
another in an ancestral darkness. That is why I merely put down here the
names to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about