ff Europe, assumes an Asiatic
livery. The very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated
night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.

And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded
with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and
sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of
light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing
together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian
Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the
engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and
eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven
even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the
horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering
prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is
the voyage from Europe to India still.

I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will
have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais,
by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of
a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is
how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of
the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly
conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas
and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....

To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from
something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. I
felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to
justify my feelings....

And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the
Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. A wound
may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes
out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but
a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding,
was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very
cruel to me that I could not write to her.

Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during
the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when
I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing
myself to be busy and by going to see novel