I never, till that moment, could have so much as conceived the
imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of
desolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone mad
in thirty minutes.
I remember to have approximated the impression of such empty immensity
only once before, in my younger days, when I lay on my back on a
treeless, bushless mountainside and stared up into the sky for the
better part of an hour.
You probably know the trick. If you do not, you must understand that if
you look up at the blue long enough, the flatness of the thing begins
little by little to expand, to give here and there; and the eye travels
on and on and up and up, till at length (well for you that it lasts but
the fraction of a second), you all at once see space. You generally stop
there and cry out, and--your hands over your eyes--are only too glad to
grovel close to the good old solid earth again. Just as I, so often on
short voyage, was glad to wrench my eyes away from that horrid vacancy,
to fasten them upon our sailless masts and stack, or to lay my grip upon
the sooty smudged taffrail of the only thing that stood between me and
the Outer Dark.
For we had come at last to that region of the Great Seas where no ship
goes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the unplumbed,
untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed, and we were as
much alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty space beyond
Uranus and the ken of the greater telescopes.
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