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Updated: June 26, 2025
It was wintry midnight, and the sky blazed with its undying watch- fires. This starry page was the first her childish intellect had puzzled over. She had, from early years, gazed up into the glittering temple of night, and asked: "Whence came yon silent worlds, floating in solemn grandeur along the blue, waveless ocean of space?
Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes.
I know you don't like this place. You've been here six weeks, so go." "You've had a letter from the old man, eh?" "Yes, I have," she replied, and he saw that her countenance changed; but she would say nothing more. She had decided that he must leave San Remo, and would hear no argument to the contrary. The southern sun sank slowly into the sea, now grey but waveless.
The buds decked the trees, the flowers adorned the land: the dark branches, swollen with seasonable juices, expanded into leaves, and the variegated foliage of spring, bending and singing in the breeze, rejoiced in the genial warmth of the unclouded empyrean: the brooks flowed murmuring, the sea was waveless, and the promontories that over-hung it were reflected in the placid waters; birds awoke in the woods, while abundant food for man and beast sprung up from the dark ground.
And between these containing banks wound the canal, shallow and waveless, with noisome weeds trailing on its surface afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the cottage gardens not a soul was at work, nor, by their appearance, had a soul worked in them for years past.
The warm sunlight, the islands mirrored in the waveless sea, the aromatic breath of the spruce and fir, the salty scent of the tidal shore this physical world in which they lay and that other more remote physical world of men and cities all, all was but the pictured drama of man's inner life.
Nearly everybody was in Frank costume, and our Oriental habits, especially the red Tartar boots, attracted much observation. I began to feel awkward and absurd, and longed to show myself a Christian once more. Leaving Prinkipo, we made for Constantinople, whose long array of marble domes and gilded spires gleamed like a far mirage over the waveless sea.
A long sea of gold seemed to slope away ever so gently, up and up, until it lost itself beneath the slumberous mass of clouds that curtained its farther shore. Here and there within the sea hung islets of cloud, as still as rocks in a waveless ocean. Natalie stretched out her hand, with chubby fingers outspread, and squinted between the black bars they made against the light.
In Edfu you are face to face with hugeness and with grandeur; but soon you are scarcely aware of either in the sense, at least, that connects these qualities with a certain overwhelming, almost striking down, of the spirit and the faculties. What you are aware of is your own immense and beautiful calm of utter satisfaction a calm which has quietly inundated you, like a waveless tide of the sea.
We sailed at four, with a strong favorable breeze, and the sea was really delightful as we passed among green islets clothed down to the water's edge with dense tropical vegetation, right out into the open water of the Straits of Malacca, a burning, waveless sea, into which the sun was descending in mingled flame and blood.
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