Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep. Behind her,
houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out
the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere. Gray desert banks
closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to
the vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water. She gained the
Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped
on and added to the two converging dotted lines.
"Good-by to the West!" thought Rudolph. As he mourned sentimentally at
this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote
appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness
of his emotions. "Now what does Byron say?"
The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.
That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the
gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her
search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the
deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the
half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the
clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the
unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world.
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