one morning on the way from brindisi to egypt i came up on deck at dawn because my mind was restless and i could not sleep. another solitary passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe me.
"that's crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at hand.
"crete!" said i.
"yes," he said, "crete."
he came nearer to me. "that, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis, "is the most wonderful island i've ever yet set eyes on,—quite the most wonderful."
"five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the best we can build to-day. and things—like modern things. they had bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms—and admirable sanitation—admirable. practically—american. they had better artists to serve them than your king edward has, why! minos would have laughed or screamed at all that windsor furniture. and the things they made of gold, sir—you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. not for any money. there was a go about them.... they had a kind of writing, too—before the phœnicians. no man can read it now, and there it is. fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day—they grow oranges and lemons. and they riot.... everything else gone.... it's as if men struggled up to a certain pitch and then—grew tired.... all this mediterranean; it's a tired sea...."
that was the beginning of a curious conversation. he was an american, a year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at egypt."
"in our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these worked-out regions. too apt. we don't get our perspectives. we think the whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. it hit me first down in yucatan that that wasn't so. why! the world's littered with the remains of booms and swaggering beginnings. americanism!—there's always been americanism. this mediterranean is just a museum of old americas. i guess tyre and sidon thought they were licking creation all the time. it's set me thinking. what's really going on? why—anywhere,—you're running about among ruins—anywhere. and ruins of something just as good as anything we're doing to-day. better—in some ways. it takes the heart out of you...."
it was gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. i remember very vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched crete pass away northward and i listened to his talk.
"i was coming out of new york harbor a month ago and looking back at the skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;—'that's just the next ruin,' i thought."
i remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is indistinct.
we had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until he left me on his way to abydos we seem now to have been conversing all the time. and almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than the countless beginnings that have gone before.
"there's science," said i a little doubtfully.
"at cnossus there they had dædalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. dædalus! he was an f.r.s. all right. i haven't a doubt he flew. if they hadn't steel they had brass. we're too conceited about our little modern things."
