Since My Return To
England It Has Been Told Me That Like Sounds Have Been Heard At
Sea, And That The Sailor Becalmed Under A Vertical Sun In The Midst
Of The Wide Ocean Has Listened In Trembling Wonder To The Chime Of
His Own Village Bells.
At this time I kept a poor shabby pretence of a journal, which just
enabled me to know the
Day of the month and the week according to
the European calendar, and when in my tent at night I got out my
pocket-book I found that the day was Sunday, and roughly allowing
for the difference of time in this longitude, I concluded that at
the moment of my hearing that strange peal the church-going bells
of Marlen must have been actually calling the prim congregation of
the parish to morning prayer. The coincidence amused me faintly,
but I could not pluck up the least hope that the effect which I had
experienced was anything other than an illusion, an illusion liable
to be explained (as every illusion is in these days) by some of the
philosophers who guess at Nature's riddles. It would have been
sweeter to believe that my kneeling mother by some pious
enchantment had asked, and found, this spell to rouse me from my
scandalous forgetfulness of God's holy day, but my fancy was too
weak to carry a faith like that. Indeed, the vale through which
the bells of Marlen send their song is a highly respectable vale,
and its people (save one, two, or three) are wholly unaddicted to
the practice of magical arts.
After the fifth day of my journey I no longer travelled over
shifting hills, but came upon a dead level, a dead level bed of
sand, quite hard, and studded with small shining pebbles.
The heat grew fierce; there was no valley nor hollow, no hill, no
mound, no shadow of hill nor of mound, by which I could mark the
way I was making. Hour by hour I advanced, and saw no change - I
was still the very centre of a round horizon; hour by hour I
advanced, and still there was the same, and the same, and the same-
-the same circle of flaming sky - the same circle of sand still
glaring with light and fire. Over all the heaven above, over all
the earth beneath, there was no visible power that could balk the
fierce will of the sun: "he rejoiced as a strong man to run a
race; his going forth was from the end of the heaven, and his
circuit unto the ends of it; and there was nothing hid from the
heat thereof." From pole to pole, and from the east to the west,
he brandished his fiery sceptre as though he had usurped all heaven
and earth. As he bid the soft Persian in ancient times, so now,
and fiercely too, he bid me bow down and worship him; so now in his
pride he seemed to command me, and say, "Thou shalt have none other
gods but me." I was all alone before him.
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