Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/289



, when I have wandered away—away over the wild and apparently endless moors, where I could see nothing but the brown heath below, and the blue skies above me; when I have roamed on far from men, from their busy haunts, and the signs and tokens of their active worldly labours, which, after all, are but molehills, that Time, or some restless and turbulent Tamerlane, shall again level to the ground; when I have strayed, light of heart and proudly free as a Bedouin, whom no fixed domicile, no narrow circumscribed fields chain to one spot, but who, as its owner, occupies all he beholds; who does not indeed dwell, but pitches his tent where he will; if then my keen searching glances along the horizon have discovered a house, how often—God forgive me! has not the passing thought arisen in my mind—for it was no settled desire—to wish that the human habitation was annihilated. There, must dwell trouble and sorrow; there, must exist disputes about mine and thine! Ah! the happy desert is both thine and mine, is every one's, is no one's. A lover of the woods would have contented himself with wishing a whole colony of trees planted there; I have wished that the heath could have remained as it was a thousand years ago, uncultivated by human hands, untrodden by human feet! Yet this wish was not always satisfactory to myself, for when fatigued, overheated, suffering from hunger and thirst, I have endeavoured to turn my thoughts with longing to an Arab's tent and rude hospitality, I have caught myself thanking heaven that a house thatched with broom—at not a mile's distance—promised me shelter and refreshment.

It so happened that some years ago, one calm warm September day, I found myself on the same heath that, in my Arabian dreams, I called mine. Not a breath of wind crept among the purple heather; the air was sultry and heavy, the distant hills that bounded the view seemed to float like clouds around the immense plain, and assumed the appearances of houses, towns, castles, men, and animals; but all was vague in outline, and ever shifting, as the images seen in dreams. A cottage would expand into a church, and that again into a pyramid; here, suddenly uprose one spire; there, as suddenly sank another; a man turned into a horse, and that again into an elephant; here, glided a little boat, and there, a ship with every sail spread. Long did my delighted eyes gaze on these fantastic figures—a panorama that only the mariner or the wanderer of the desert has ever the pleasure of beholding—when, becoming a prey to hunger and to thirst, I began to look for a real house among the many false ones in my sight. I longed most earnestly to exchange all my beautiful fairy palaces for one single peasant's cottage.