Page:The Garden of Years.djvu/39



Africa frowned across my breathless lee,

Mute, unforgetful, cursed, but unconquered still,

Sahara-hemmed in heart and destiny,

Unpardoned yet, and yet too proud for plea,

Pregnant with purpose of unaltered ill.

Distant, the swerved sirocco seemed to spill

From its black cup a plague upon the land,

And, crawling on past barren ridge and hill

Through hope-devouring endlessness of sand,

The swarthy Nile sulked northward to the sea.

Those earliest Americas of all

That, with half-lowered lids, dream on the day

Of the imperial Incas, seemed to call,

As, when their own long, languid evenings fall,

The sea calls landward from her curving bay.

Hearing, I answered, bent my aimless way

To the cool shade that nestled ’neath their palms,

And so, long nights on sloping shoreways lay,

While moons crept, silver-shod, across the calms,

And wrapped their radiance in the horizon’s pall.