42 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



fences can be until we have seen the dead-fall 

 bamboo lines of the Bornean Dyaks, which wind 

 up and down hill through the jungle, and each 

 morning are a shambles of pitiful dead things, 

 from moon rats to argus pheasants. And it will 

 be decades before we can ever know the beauty 

 of English wall-trained fruit trees, planted long 

 before we became a nation. 



It were easy to think of scores of others, but I 

 wish only to get my mind in the mood of think- 

 ing barriers, with all the details cast aside and only 

 the abstract remaining. 



Walls can be more than tenuous, they can be 

 actually invisible, as when I once camped by the 

 rim of a great abyss near southern Tibet, up which 

 there poured so steady a wall of wind that I used 

 to lean recklessly far out against it, farther than 

 from where I could possibly recover my balance 

 in the event of its slacking. It was a fool stunt, 

 now that I look back upon it, but it showed me that 

 the air could offer a support like a board. 



I am leading up to a wall of water, not the kind 

 which once banked up in the Red Sea, but one that 

 we came on unexpectedly in the Pacific Ocean. 



On March twenty-eighth we made the transit of 

 the Panama Canal, and prepared to investigate 

 the life of that part of the Pacific which, though 

 on the Equator, is traversed in a northwesterly 

 direction by the cold Antarctic stream known as 

 the Humboldt Current. This is a reversal of the 

 conditions brought about by the Gulf Stream, 

 and is responsible for many paradoxical facts, such 



