So, on the 6th of November, 1824, we set sail. I had been waiting three
years to arrive at this starting-point,--my whole life, indeed, had
been dumbly turning towards it,--yet now I commenced it with a coolness
and tranquillity far exceeding that I had possessed on many
comparatively trifling occasions. It is often so. We are borne along on
the current like drift-wood, and, spying jutting rocks or tremendous
cataracts ahead, fancy, "Here we shall be stranded, there buoyed up,
there dashed in pieces over those falls,"--but, for all that, we glide
over those threatened catastrophes in a very commonplace manner, and
are aware of what we have been passing only upon looking back at them.
So no one sees the great light shining from Heaven,--for the people are
blear-eyed, and Saul is blinded. But as I left Cairo in the greatening
distance, floating onward to the heart of the mysterious river, I
floated also into the twin current of thought, that, flowing full and
impetuous from the shores of the peopled Mediterranean, follows the
silent river, and tracks it to its hidden lurking-place in the blank
desert. Onward, past the breathless sands of the Libyan Desert, past
the hundred-gated Thebes, past the stone guardians of Abou-Simbel,
waiting in majestic patience for their spell of silence to be
broken,--onward.
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