National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0452 |
The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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No one, indeed, who has been alone with Nature in her
purest aspects, and seen her in so many different forms, can
help pondering over her meanings; and though, in the strain
and stress of travel, her deepest messages may not have reached
my ear, now, in the after-calm, when I have all the varied
scenes as vividly before me as on the day I saw them, and
have, moreover, leisure to appreciate them and feel their fullest
influence, I can realize something of her grandeur, the mighty
scale on which she works, and the infinite beauty of all she
does. These impressions, as I stand now at the close of my
narrative, with the many scenes which the writing of it has
brought back to my mind full before my eyes, crowd upon
me, and I long to be able to record them as clearly as I feel
them, for the benefit of those who have not had the leisure
or the opportunity to visit the jealously guarded regions of
the earth where Nature reveals herself most clearly.
Upon no occasion were the wonders of the universe more
impressively brought before my mind than in the long, lonely
marches in the Gobi Desert. For seventy days I was travelling
across the desert, and, knowing that the marches would be
made mostly by night, I had brought with me one of those
popular books on astronomy which put so clearly before the
reader the main principles of the working of the stellar universe.
I used to read it by day, and in the long hours of the night
march ponder over the meaning of what I had read. There, far
away in the desert, there was little to disturb the outward flow
of feeling towards Nature. There, before me, was nothing but
Nature. The boundless plain beneath, and the starry skies
above. And skies, too, such as are not to be seen in the
murky atmospheres of the less pure regions of the earth, but
clear and bright as they can only be in the far, original depths
of Nature. In those pure skies the stars shone out in unrivalled
brilliancy, and hour after hour, through the long nights, I
would watch them in their courses over the heavens, and think
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