Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 30, April, 1860

I dropped the curtains of the bed, drew those of the window more closely, to exclude the shrill winter wind that was blowing the slant sleet against the clattering window-panes, broke up the lump of cannel coal in the grate into a bright blaze that subsided into a warm, steady glow of heat and light, drew an arm-chair and a little table up to the cheerful fire, and sat down to read the manuscript which the quiet man behind the curtains had given me. Why shouldn't I (I was his physician) make myself as comfortable as was possible at two o'clock of a stormy winter night, in a house that contained but two persons beside my German patient,—a half-stupid serving-man, doubtless already asleep down-stairs, and myself? This is what I read that night, with the comfortable fire on one side, and Death, holding strange colloquy with the fitful, screaming, moaning wind, on the other.

As I wish simply to relate what has happened to me, (thus the manuscript began,) what I attempted, in what I sinned, and how I failed, I deem no introduction or genealogies necessary to the first part of my life. I was an only child of parents who were passionately fond of me,—the more, perhaps, because an accident that had happened to me in my childhood rendered me for some years a partial invalid. One day, (I was about five years old then,) a gentleman paid a visit to my father, riding a splendid Arabian horse. Upon dismounting, he tied the horse near the steps of the piazza instead of the horseblock, so that I found I was just upon the level with the stirrup, standing at a certain elevation. Half as an experiment, to try whether I could touch the horse without his starting, I managed to get my foot into the stirrup, and so mounted upon his back. The horse, feeling the light burden, did start, broke from his fastening, and sped away with me on his back at the top of his speed. He ran several miles without stopping, and finished by pitching me off his back upon the ground, in leaping a fence. This fall produced some disease of the spine, which clung to me till I was twelve years old, when it was almost miraculously cured by an itinerant Arab physician. He was generally pronounced to be a quack, but he certainly effected many wonderful cures, mine among others.

I had always been an imaginative child; and my long-continued sedentary life compelling me (a welcome compulsion) to reading as my chief occupation and amusement, I acquired much knowledge beyond my years.

My reading generally had one peculiar tone: a certain kind of mystery was an essential ingredient in the fascination that books which I considered interesting had for me. My earliest fairy tales were not those unexciting stories in which the good genius appears at the beginning of the book, endowing the hero with such an invincible talisman that suspense is banished from the reader's mind, too well enabled to foresee the triumph at the end; but stories of long, painful quests after hidden treasure,—mysterious enchantments thrown around certain persons by witch or wizard, drawing the subject in charmed circles nearer and nearer to his royal or ruinous destiny,—strange spells cast upon bewitched houses or places, that could be removed only by the one hand appointed by Fate. So I pored over the misty legends of the San Grail, and the sweet story of "The Sleeping Beauty," as my first literature; and as the rough years of practical boyhood trooped up to elbow my dreaming childhood out of existence, I fed the same hunger for the hidden and mysterious with Detective-Police stories, Captain Kidd's voyages, and wild tales of wrecks on the Spanish Main, of those vessels of fabulous wealth that strewed the deep sea's lap with gems (so the stories ran) of lustre almost rare enough to light the paths to their secret hiding-places.

But in the last year of my captivity as an invalid a new pleasure fell into my hands. I discovered my first book of travels in my father's library, and as with a magical key unlocked the gate of an enchanted realm of wondrous and ceaseless beauty. It was Sir John Mandeville who introduced me to this field of exhaustless delight; not a very trustworthy guide, it must be confessed,—but my knowledge at that time was too limited to check the boundless faith I reposed in his narrative. It was such an astonishment to discover that men, black-coated and black-trousered men, such as I saw in crowds every day in the street from my sofa-corner, (we had moved to the city shortly after my accident,) had actually broken away from that steady stream of people, and had traversed countries as wild and unknown as the lands in the Nibelungen Lied, that my respect for the race rose amazingly. I scanned eagerly the sleek, complacent faces of the portly burghers, or those of the threadbare schoolmasters, thinned like carving-knives by perpetual sharpening on the steel of Latin syntax, in search of men who could have dared the ghastly terrors of the North with Ross or Parry, or the scorching jungles of the Equator with Burckhardt and Park. Cut off for so long a time from actual contact with the outside world, I could better imagine the brooding stillness of the Great Desert, I could more easily picture the weird ice-palaces of the Pole, waiting, waiting forever in awful state, like the deserted halls of the Walhalla for their slain gods to return, than many of the common street-scenes in my own city, which I had only vaguely heard mentioned.

I followed the footsteps of the Great Seekers over the wastes, the untrodden paths of the world; I tracked Columbus across the pathless Atlantic,—heard, with Balboa, the "wave of the loud-roaring ocean break upon the long shore, and the vast sea of the Pacific forever crash on the beach,"—gazed with Cortés on the temples of the Sun in the startling Mexican empire,—or wandered with Pizarro through the silver-lined palaces of Peru. But a secret affection drew me to the mysterious regions of the East and South,—towards Arabia, the wild Ishmael bequeathing sworded Korans and subtile Aristotles as legacies to the sons of the freed-woman,—to solemn Egypt, riddle of nations, the vast, silent, impenetrable mystery of the world. By continual pondering over the footsteps of the Seekers, the Sought-for seemed to grow to vast proportions, and the Found to shrink to inappreciable littleness. For me, over the dreary ice-plains of the Poles, over the profound bosom of Africa, the far-stretching steppes of Asia, and the rocky wilds of America, a great silence brooded, and in the unexplored void faint footfalls could be heard here and there, threading their way in the darkness. But while the longing to plunge, myself, into these dim regions of expectation grew more intense each day, the prison-chains that had always bound me still kept their habitual hold upon me, even after my recovery. I dreamt not of making even the vaguest plans for undertaking explorations myself. So I read and dreamt, filling my room with wild African or monotonous Egyptian scenery, until I was almost weaned from ordinary Occidental life.

I passed four blissful years In this happy dream-life, and then it was abruptly brought to an end by the death of my father and mother almost simultaneously by an epidemic fever prevailing in the neighborhood. I was away from home at a bachelor uncle's at the time, and so was unexpectedly thrown on his hands, an orphan, penniless, except in the possession of the small house my father had owned in the country before our removal to the city, and to be provided for.

My uncle placed me in a mercantile house to learn business, and, after exercising some slight supervision over me a few months, left me entirely to my own resources. As, however, he had previously taken care that these resources should be sufficient, I got along very well upon them, was regularly promoted, and in the space of six years, at the age of twenty-one, was in a rather responsible situation in the house, with a good salary. But my whole attention could not be absorbed in the dull routine of business, my most precious hours were devoted to reading, in which I still pursued my old childish track of speculation, with the difference that I exchanged Sinbad's valley of diamonds for Arabia Petraea, Sir John Mandeville for Herodotus, and Robinson Crusoe for Belzoni and Burckhardt Whether my interest in these Oriental studies arose from the fact of the house being concerned in the importation of the products of the Indies, or whether from the secret attraction that had drawn me Eastward since my earliest childhood, as if the Arab doctor had bewitched in curing me, I cannot say; probably it was the former, especially as the India business became gradually more and more intrusted to my hands.