122 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



The penalty or the advantage of human experi- 

 ence in various parts of the world is to stimulate 

 similes of antithetical relationship. I have often 

 laid at anchor off a gentle land, and before dawn 

 watched the twinkling lights of villages and isolated 

 farms go out one by one. Then the grey dawn 

 picks out the larger hills and darker woodlands and 

 finally the lesser objects. Farm houses material- 

 ize and from each goes up a twist of smoke, while 

 that from the villages merges and floats slowly off 

 as a unified cloud. Such was my introduction to 

 the first volcanic eruption which I had ever seen 

 actually come into being. Although the outward 

 view recalled only such homely scenes, yet never 

 was there absent from my mind its tremendous 

 significance (Fig. 26). 



Before the sun rose, the shifting light wrought 

 another small magic. The lights had gone, the 

 smoke had curled up peacefully for a half -hour, 

 when I began to see that it did not twist and thread 

 up as from breakfast fires beneath chimneys — it 

 billowed and rolled. Then the houses dissolved 

 before my eyes and became conical mounds or 

 smoking ruins; what might have been fertile hill- 

 slopes greyed to cinders, dotted with the upright 

 skeletons of tortured or dead trees. Another case- 

 ment of the magic window of memory opened, and 

 I was lying before a mud-caked grating with the 

 Verdun sentry, looking out upon an identical land- 

 scape: a few smoking ash heaps where once was 

 Fleury, a cindery pile and a score of scarecrow 

 trees in place of the peaceful beauty of Hadre- 



