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Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world.
Ah! you must see the great ocean-world for yourself; you must sail over the crests of the waves, and learn to swim and dive. If you have never yet been to the seaside, there is indeed a treat in store for you some day, and I should like to be with you when that day comes, and catch a sight of your face, so full of wonder and pleasure.
This is his mode of reasoning: Why did nature put upon me this burden of ugliness this Laplander's nose, this Moorish mouth, these Hottentot eyes? Death and destruction! Why was she such a partisan? But no, I do her injustice. She gave us wit when she placed us naked and miserable on the shore of this great ocean-world. Swim who can, and whoso is too clumsy let him sink.
For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of valves small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world's destiny.
But all remained as it was far and wide, no living thing but ourselves, and the ocean-world. Not once did we dare to speak aloud, through fear that the dead Captain there nailed to the mast would bend his rigid eyes upon us, or lest one of the corpses should turn his head. At last we arrived at a staircase, which led into the hold.
Into that old Homeric world we enter through the portals of the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," and see the peaks of Olympus shining afar off in white splendor like silvery clouds, not looking for or expecting either a loftier or a purer heaven. Somewhere on the bounds of the dim ocean-world we know that there is an exiled court, a faded sort of St.
Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be true that no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severely silent having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is not silent if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. The young man here has been just telling me that it was only last month one followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic.
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