Library / Literature & Fiction
Reprinted Pieces
- Pages
- about 330
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 6 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the
dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in
books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a strong fascination for
my mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come to
pass that I never have been round the world, never have been shipwrecked,
ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.
Sitting on my ruddy hearth in the twilight of New Year’s Eve, I find
incidents of travel rise around me from all the latitudes and longitudes
of the globe. They observe no order or sequence, but appear and vanish
as they will—‘come like shadows, so depart.’ Columbus, alone upon the
sea with his disaffected crew, looks over the waste of waters from his
high station on the poop of his ship, and sees the first uncertain
glimmer of the light, ‘rising and falling with the waves, like a torch in
the bark of some fisherman,’ which is the shining star of a new world.
Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory horrors which shall
often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed away.
Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey—would that it
had been his last!—lies perishing of hunger with his brave companions:
each emaciated figure stretched upon its miserable bed without the power
to rise: all, dividing the weary days between their prayers, their
remembrances of the dear ones at home, and conversation on the pleasures
of eating; the last-named topic being ever present to them, likewise, in
their dreams. All the African travellers, wayworn, solitary and sad,
submit themselves again to drunken, murderous, man-selling despots, of
the lowest order of humanity; and Mungo Park, fainting under a tree and
succoured by a woman, gratefully remembers how his Good Samaritan has
always come to him in woman’s shape, the wide world over.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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