Читать книгу Seven League Boots - Richard Halliburton - Страница 3
ОглавлениеSEVEN LEAGUE BOOTS
One midsummer night, not long ago, a motor-powered fishing boat put out to sea from the harbor of a small port on the Gulf of Mexico.
There were no waves, no wind. Upon the unruffled waters of the Gulf the planets caught glimpses of themselves, and the stars strewed their images in the helmsman’s path.
The fishing boat had a crew of two. I was the only passenger. With a ten-hour voyage ahead, I tried, using my suitcase for a pillow, to make myself comfortable on the deck.
But there was no comfort. The engine was too close, the deck too hard. So I lay awake, face up to the stars, listening to the splashing water at the prow—and thinking:
The last three days—what eventful days they had been for me! Three days ago I had been sitting, just a little bored perhaps, in my house on the Pacific coast, looking out across the blue channel that separated me from Catalina Island twenty miles away. Beyond Catalina lay Hawaii, and beyond that Borneo, and still further Bali.... I had been to Hawaii, and Borneo, and Bali ... but never, I reflected, to Catalina. Some afternoon I ought to make this popular little trip. Anything to break the spell of an idle California summer....
And now, seventy-two hours later, I found myself three thousand miles away, leaping off from the southern tip of Florida, westward into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico—found myself catapulted suddenly out of my lazy life by a commission that promised violent activity, perpetual change of scene, and the constant shock of novelty for months to come.
I’m afraid I smiled a little to myself when I thought of it ... for this was the sort of opportunity every writer, surely once in his life, has dreamed about. I had been commissioned to go anywhere in the world I wished, and write about whatever pleased me. If I wanted to fly to Zululand and write about that—very good. If I wanted to call on the Queen of Bulgaria and write about that—also very good. My only orders were to move fast, visit strange places, try to meet whomever I thought interesting and important—and to start at once.
Such a commission was so beautiful I felt it was almost immoral.
Nevertheless, three nights after this invitation had dropped into my lap, I was sailing aboard the fishing boat toward my first “strange place.”
Back in California, I’d read the published letters of Dr. Samuel Mudd to his wife.[1] Dr. Mudd (misleadingly unheroic name!) was the physician who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after the murder of Lincoln and suffered, in consequence, what many believe was a tragic miscarriage of justice. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Fort Jefferson, that incredible Federal sea-fortress on the Dry Tortugas, the outwardmost of the Florida keys. Dreyfus himself could not have told a more tragic and bitter story than Dr. Mudd, nor was Dreyfus’ prison in French Guiana ever more terrible than Fort Jefferson. Of all the points of historical interest I had yet to see in America, this seemed most worthy of a journey.
And so, launched upon my new quest, I left California, reached Florida, and headed for Fort Jefferson, sixty miles out in the Gulf from Key West.
But after Fort Jefferson——? Because of the pressure of time I’d had no opportunity to re-examine the map of the world and chart my year ahead. Where was I going next—now that I could go anywhere?
A flood of answers met these questions:
Cuba, certainly. Through a pleasant friendship with Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson,[2] I had developed a great desire to know more about the Spanish-American War. Hobson had made me eager to visit Santiago, at the east end of the island, where he had sunk the Merrimac, and where the Spanish warships, in the famous naval battle that followed, were driven in flames upon the shore.
Copyright, U. S. Navy
The harbor of Santiago de Cuba, showing the narrow entrance at the bottom of the page. Crowning the promontory at the right of the entrance is Morro Castle. The white ship just beyond the Castle indicates the point where Hobson intended to sink the Merrimac. The second white ship indicates the point where it actually sank.
And I was resolved to travel to Haiti and climb the Bonnet à l’Évêque, the mountain soaring three thousand feet above Cap Haitien, from the summit of which the ruins of King Christophe’s Citadel, one of the wonders of the world, still command the Black Republic.
I knew the astonishing story of the rediscovery of Columbus’ bones only a generation ago, in a church in the city of Santo Domingo. At this same church the bones are still to be seen, incased in the original leaden casket. Santo Domingo was another place I must explore.
A biography of Hannibal and the chapters on the Punic Wars in Livy’s History of Rome had given me the idea of retracing Hannibal’s elephant-march across the Alps, aboard an elephant of my own, the next time I got to Europe—just as a sporting adventure.
And Russia! I was particularly interested in the tragic end of the Romanoffs. On the map I had found Ekaterinburg, the city in Siberia where the Czar and his family were massacred, and I had made it one of my travel goals.
And Abyssinia! Now was my chance to reach this marvelous and romantic land.
Several times, in years past, I had just missed getting to Mount Athos, that fantastic community in northern Greece where no woman, or any female animal or fowl, has been allowed for centuries. I would include Athos on my tour.
I wanted to return to Palestine and explore the hilltop, overhanging the Dead Sea, where one finds the site of the palace in which Salome danced for the head of John the Baptist.
Arabia Deserta and the explorations of Sir Richard Burton had rekindled my lifelong desire to visit Mecca.
Undisturbed for six months, I had had little else to do but read books about the foreign world ... hungry, each time I closed one, to see for myself the countries and the people that lived in its pages.
And now suddenly had come the command to go and see them all, to possess myself of a pair of seven league boots and stride across the map, from nation to nation, from continent to continent, straightway to these beckoning goals, to these islands of desire.
At dawn, one of the fishermen roused me, and suggested that I look to the west. There, three miles away, across the pale gray water, I saw, through the early morning haze, the sinister, scowling walls of Fort Jefferson rising, like a sea-monster with a hundred eyes, right out of the waves.
| [1] | See The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, containing Letters from Fort Jefferson, edited by his daughter, Nettie Mudd; Neale Publishing House, 1906. |
| [2] | Died 1937. |
