Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
He felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He found his pleasure in watching them the pleasure of the Ancient Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it; and personal desire nothing.
When all around is calm and peaceful; when the sound of voices comes with muffled sound over the smooth water; when the eye sees nothing save a ghostly white horizon all round close at hand; when almost the only sound that breaks on the ear is the gentle lapping of the sea, or the quiet creak of plank and spar, as the vessel slowly lifts and falls on the gentle swell, and when landsmen perchance feel most secure then it is that the dark cloud of danger lowers most heavily, though perhaps unrecognised, over the mariner, and stirs him to anxious watchfulness, when apparently in profoundest repose.
The way-marks of the mariner are the sun by day and the moon and stars by night; no kindred ship answers back its red-cross signal; but there they float, the germ of a future nation, upon the desert waters.
The sea might be raging along the chain of islands and reefs lying between Iviza and Formentera; the narrow channels might be boiling caldrons, the rocks crowned with foam, and the rude men of the sea might acknowledge themselves vanquished and seek safety in the harbors, the passage might be closed against every living thing, the islands shut off from the rest of the world, but this signified nothing to the invincible mariner with the hairless head, to him who walks with fleshless legs, who rushes with gigantic strides over mountain and sea.
The hares still sported and burrowed on the hill sides, but excepting these there were no signs of life whatever. Never did shipwrecked mariner watch for the morning more anxiously than did I through that weary, endless night, for I knew that a glimpse of the distance in any one direction would enable me to steer my course homewards.
The morning's paper lay carelessly opened and thrown aside. He caught it up, turned it over, and read the account of a "Strange Story from Iping" that the mariner at Port Stowe had spelt over so painfully to Mr. Marvel. Kemp read it swiftly. "Wrapped up!" said Kemp. "Disguised! Hiding it! 'No one seems to have been aware of his misfortune. What the devil is his game?"
He now learned that the Armada had taken captive four Dutch men-of-war and many English ships; that, after the Spaniards had been followed from Calais roads by the enemy's fleet, there had been an action, which the English had attempted in vain to avoid; off Newcastle; that Medina Sidonia had charged upon them so vigorously, as to sink twenty of their ships, and to capture twenty-six others, good and sound; that the others, to escape perdition, had fled, after suffering great damage, and had then gone to pieces, all hands perishing; that the Armada had taken a port in Scotland, where it was very comfortably established; that the flag-ship of Lord-admiral Howard, of Drake; and of that "distinguished mariner Hawkins," had all been sunk in action, and that no soul had been saved except Drake, who had escaped in a cock-boat.
Yonder Greenwich pensioner, too, in his costume of three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned, brass-buttoned blue coat with ample skirts, which makes him look like a contemporary of Admiral Benbow, that tough old mariner may hear a word or two which will go nearer his heart than anything that the chaplain of the Hospital can be expected to deliver.
Still the fleet went on without seeing land, and, as it was in want of fresh water, the admiral was thinking of changing his course, and, indeed, on Thursday, the 31st of July, had commenced steering northwards for some hours, when, to use his own words, "as God had always been accustomed to show mercy to him," a certain mariner of Huelva, a follower of the admiral's, named Alonzo Perez, happened to go up aloft upon the maintop-sail of the admiral's ship, and suddenly saw land towards the south-west, about fifteen leagues off.
Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay. Any one activity, whatever it may be, when it has ceased at its proper time, suffers no evil because it has ceased; nor he who has done this act, does he suffer any evil for this reason, that the act has ceased.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking