i found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from europe to asia. one steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,—the canal has changed nothing of that. suez is a first dab of tumultuous orientalism, noisy and vivid. and then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out into the lonely dark blue waters of the red sea. right and left the shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to sinai. it is like no european landscape. the boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked ahead. it is a new world with a new atmosphere. then comes wave upon wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the white clothes appear. everyone casts off europe, assumes an asiatic livery. the very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated night, is unfamiliar, an asiatic sun.
and so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to aden; it is studded with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of light. and then, land and the last lateen sails of aden vanishing together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the indian ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose titan ring the engines seem to throb in vain. how one paces the ship day by day, and eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks heaven even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering prison!... a hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is the voyage from europe to india still.
i suppose by the time that you will go to india all this prelude will have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from calais, by way of baku or constantinople; you will have none of this effect of a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. but that is how i went to india. everything seemed to expand; i was coming out of the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly conflicts of the mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....
to go from europe to asia is like going from norway to russia, from something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. i felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all asia seems moving forward to justify my feelings....
and i remember too that as i went down the red sea and again in the indian ocean i had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. a wound may heal and still leave pain. i was coming out of europe as one comes out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, i seemed but a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding, was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. it seemed very cruel to me that i could not write to her.
such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when i was weary. at other times i could banish and overcome them by forcing myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.
