XXXVIII.
Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made an adventurous voyage; and
there is no such sea for adventurous voyages as the Mediterranean--
the inland sea which the ancients looked upon as so vast and so
full of wonders. And, indeed, it was terrible and wonderful; for
it is we alone who, swayed by the audacity of our minds and the
tremors of our hearts, are the sole artisans of all the wonder and
romance of the world.
It was for the Mediterranean sailors that fair-haired sirens sang
among the black rocks seething in white foam and mysterious voices
spoke in the darkness above the moving wave--voices menacing,
seductive, or prophetic, like that voice heard at the beginning of
the Christian era by the master of an African vessel in the Gulf of
Syrta, whose calm nights are full of strange murmurs and flitting
shadows. It called him by name, bidding him go and tell all men
that the great god Pan was dead. But the great legend of the
Mediterranean, the legend of traditional song and grave history,
lives, fascinating and immortal, in our minds.
The dark and fearful sea of the subtle Ulysses' wanderings,
agitated by the wrath of Olympian gods, harbouring on its isles the
fury of strange monsters and the wiles of strange women; the
highway of heroes and sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the
workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants and the pleasure lake of the
Roman Caesars, claims the veneration of every seaman as the
historical home of that spirit of open defiance against the great
waters of the earth which is the very soul of his calling. Issuing
thence to the west and south, as a youth leaves the shelter of his
parental house, this spirit found the way to the Indies, discovered
the coasts of a new continent, and traversed at last the immensity
of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands remote and
mysterious like the constellations of the sky.
The first impulse of navigation took its visible form in that
tideless basin freed from hidden shoals and treacherous currents,
as if in tender regard for the infancy of the art. The steep
shores of the Mediterranean favoured the beginners in one of
humanity's most daring enterprises, and the enchanting inland sea
of classic adventure has led mankind gently from headland to
headland, from bay to bay, from island to island, out into the
promise of world-wide oceans beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
