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

"So," he said, "you have come at last; I am tired of waiting for you"; and he began to collect his gun, knife, etc., which were lying on the ground beside him.

"And who are you," I returned, "who lie in wait for me? I think, Sir, you have the advantage."

Here the stranger interrupted me with a hearty laugh. "My dear fellow," he cried, "you are entirely mistaken. The technical advantage that you attribute to me is an error, as I do not have the honor of knowing your name, though you may know mine without further preface,—Frederick Herndon; and the real advantage which I wish to avail myself of, a boat, is obviously on your side. The long and the short of it is," he added, (composedly extricating himself from the brushwood,) "that, travelling up in this direction for discovery and that sort of thing, you know, I heard at Sennaar that a white man with an Egyptian servant had just left the town, and were going in my direction in a boat. So I resolved to overtake them, and with their, or your, permission, join company. But they, or you, kept just in advance, and it was only by dint of a forced march in the night that I passed you. I learned at the last Dinka village that no such party had been yet seen, and concluded to await the your arrival here, where I pitched my tent a day and a night waiting for you. I am heartily glad to see you, I assure you."

With this explanation, the stranger made a spring, and leaped upon the yacht.

"Upon my word," said I, still bewildered by his sudden appearance, "you are very unceremonious."

"That," he rejoined, "is a way we Americans have. We cannot stop to palaver. What would become of our manifest destiny? But since you are so kind, I will call my Egyptian. Times are changed since we were bondsmen in Egypt, have they not? Ah, I forgot,—you are not an American, and therefore cannot claim even our remote connection with the Ten Lost Tribes." Then raising his voice, "Here, Ibrahim!"

Again a face, but this time a swarthy one, emerged from behind a bush, and in answer to a few directions in his own dialect the man came down to the boat, threw in the tent and some other articles of traveller's furniture, and sprang in with the nonchalance of his master.

A little recovered from my first surprise, I seized the opportunity of a little delay in getting the boat adrift again to examine my new companion. He was standing carelessly upon the little deck of the vessel where he had first entered, and the strong morning light fell full upon his well-knit figure and apparently handsome face. The forehead was rather low, prominent above the eyebrows, and with keen, hollow temples, but deficient both in comprehensiveness and ideality. The hazel eyes were brilliant, but restless and shallow,—the mouth of good size, but with few curves, and perhaps a little too close for so young a face. The well-cut nose and chin and clean fine outline of face, the self-reliant pose of the neck and confident set of the shoulders characterized him as decisive and energetic, while the pleasant and rather boyish smile that lighted up his face dispelled presently the peculiarly hard expression I had at first found in analyzing it. Whether it was the hard, shrewd light from which all the tender and delicate grace of the early morning had departed, I knew not; but it struck me that I could not find a particle of shade in his whole appearance. I seemed at once to take him in, as one sees the whole of a sunny country where there are no woods or mountains or valleys. And, in fact, I never did find any,—never any cool recesses in his character; and as no sudden depths ever opened in his eyes, so nothing was ever left to be revealed in his character;—like them, it could be sounded at once. That picture of him, standing there on my deck, with an indefinite expression of belonging to the place, as he would have belonged on his own hearth-rug at home, often recurred to me, again to be renewed and confirmed.

And thus carelessly was swept into my path, as a stray waif, that man who would in one little moment change my whole life! It is always so. Our life sweeps onward like a river, brushing in here a little sand, there a few rushes, till the accumulated drift-wood chokes the current, or some larger tree falling across it turns it into a new channel.

I had been so long unaccustomed to company that I found it quite a pleasant change to have some one to talk to; some one to sympathize with I neither wanted nor expected; I certainly did not find such a one in my new acquaintance. For the first two or three days I simply regarded him with the sort of wondering curiosity with which we examine a new natural phenomenon of any sort. His perfect self-possession and coolness, the nil-admirari and nil-agitari atmosphere which surrounded him, excited my admiration at first, till I discovered that it arose, not from the composure of a mind too deep-rooted to be swayed by external circumstances, but rather from a peculiar hardness and unimpressibility of temperament that kept him on the same level all the time. He had been born at a certain temperature, and still preserved it, from a sort of vis inertive of constitution. This impenetrability had the effect of a somewhat buoyant disposition, not because he could be buoyed on the tide of any strong emotion, but because few things could disturb or excite him. Unable to grasp the significance of anything outside of himself and his attributes, he took immense pride in stamping his character, his nationality, his practicality, upon every series of circumstances by which he was surrounded: he sailed up the Nile as if it were the Mississippi; although a well-enough-informed man, he practically ignored the importance of any city anterior to the Plymouth Settlement, or at least to London, which had the honor of sending colonists to New England; and he would have discussed American politics in the heart of Africa, had not my ignorance upon the topic generally excluded it from our conversation. He had what is most wrongly termed an exceedingly practical mind,—that is, not one that appreciates the practical existence and value of thought as such, considering that a praxis , but a mind that denied the existence of a thought until it had become realized in visible action.

"'The end of a man is an action, and not a thought, though it be the noblest,' as Carlyle has well written," he triumphantly quoted to me, as, leaning over the little railing of the yacht, watching, at least I was, the smooth, green water gliding under the clean-cutting keel, we had been talking earnestly for some time. "A thought has value only as it is a potential action; if the action be abortive, the thought is as useless as a crank that fails to move an engine-wheel."

"Then, if action is the wheel, and thought only the crank, what does the body of your engine represent? For what purpose are your wheels turning? For the sake of merely moving?"

"No," said he, "moving to promote another action, and that another,—and–so on ad infinitum ."

"Then you leave out of your scheme a real engine, with a journey to accomplish, and an end to arrive at; for so wheels would only move wheels, and there would be an endless chain of machinery, with no plan, no object for its existence. Does not the very necessity we feel of having a reason for the existence, the operation of anything, a large plan in which to gather up all ravelled threads of various objects, proclaim thought as the final end, the real thing, of which action, more especially human action, is but the inadequate visible expression? What kinds of action does Carlyle mean, that are to be the wheels for our obedient thoughts to set in motion? Hand, arm, leg, foot action? These are all our operative machinery. Does he mean that our 'noblest thought' is to be chained as a galley-slave to these, to give them means for working a channel through which motive power may be poured in upon them? Are we to think that our fingers and feet may move and so we live, or they to run for our thought, and we live to think?"