Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/53

Rh the resistless command of nature, pointing to the necessity of perfecting their kind by breeding in the Far North a stronger and more enduring progeny, which should bring new vigour to counteract the enervating and destroying influences of the tropics? Or were these exotics unquiet souls, lured by, and driven on to, great efforts full of difficulties and dangers? Were they such individuals as we find among men, whom we catalogue, according to the results of their efforts, as "madmen" or "geniuses"? Who will answer this question for us?

I should always have been ready to forgo shooting at these avian Columbuses, Vasco de Gamas, Menédezes, Stanleys and Nansens, if I could have distinguished in the flocks flying in the mysterious half-light and half-shade of dawn or evening these unusually enterprising and tragically beautiful beings. Alas, we recognize them only when we find them covered with blood in the reeds or sweet-flag, biered on the element which is foreign and merciless to them. At such times I have mourned for them and have pictured to myself landscapes from the journeys of these victims of my hunting passion. There has come before me the yellow ribbon of the Nile, the ruins of kingly Thebes with the mystery of blessings or curses petrified in each stone block of the temples, in each colonnade. Then through the shimmering heat of the Indian plains, blanketed with sultry vapours made heavier by the aroma of flowers, I have caught the lacy patterns of the pagodas of Benares, the minarets of Allahabad and the scarlet gate of Delhi. Farther on, among plantains, elms and tamarisks, have stood out the curving-roofed temples of south China along the banks of the Pearl River and the more sombre cities dotting the course of the great Yangtze Kiang. Above