The New Frontiers of Freedom, In Barbary, The Last Frontier ...

Edward Alexander Powell

• 08 december 2025
• 9781465579454

Samenvatting:

The wander-thirst is like the drug-habit. Once you acquire it you are done for. It will never let you rest. There is no mistaking its symptoms: a hatred of the prosaic, the routine, and the humdrum; an aversion to staying long in one place; an insatiable craving to move on, move on—to see what lies beyond yonder range of hills, around that next bend in the road. It is as persistent as it is insidious. There comes the stage when you think that you are cured of it. You delude yourself into believing that you have had enough of discomforts and privations and that it is high time you settled down and had a home. You weigh the respective merits, as a place of residence, of Long Island and Southern California; you even consult an architect and subscribe to “House and Garden” and “Country Life.” But one day you casually pick up a list of steamer sailings, or stumble on your battered luggage plastered over with foreign labels, or whiff some exotic smell which brings back memories of the hot lands (there is no sense which stimulates the memory like that of smell), or see a vessel outward bound, or idly open a map, whereupon the old craving suddenly grips you like an African fever, and, almost before you realize it, you are on the out-trail once again. The symptoms usually recur with the approach of winter, when the northern days grow short and gloomy, when the shop-windows are filled with fur coats and mufflers and galoshes, when the wind howls mournfully beneath the eaves o’ nights. But the attacks which are hardest to resist come in the early spring, when the snow has disappeared, and the smell of fresh earth is in the air, and the country-side is already green in spots. That is the time when it is most difficult to control one’s restless feet. For a quarter of a century the urge of spring had perennially sent me packing to the Far Places. But when I came up from Equatoria, after a year spent beneath the shadow of the Line, I said to myself that I was through with wandering as a vocation—that I was going back to my own country and my own people and on an elm-shaded street in some tranquil community buy me a long, low, rambling house—a white house with broad, hospitable porches and green blinds. I had carefully planned it all out on the long African marches or during sleepless nights beneath the Southern Cross. I would join the local golf-club, and amuse myself with my horses and my dogs and my books, and keep my house filled with friends over the week-ends, and even go into politics in a mild way, perhaps. In fact, I proposed to do all the sensible, prosaic things for which I had never had the time before. But, before sailing for America to put these laudable resolutions into effect, I met at a Paris dinner-table the gentleman who was at that time charged with the conduct of France’s colonial affairs. We had much in common, it developed, for he too had been on those distant seaboards of the world where the Gallic empire-builders are creating a new and greater France. Lingering over the coffee and cigars we talked shop—the future of Indo-China, Madagascar’s need of harbors, Miquelon and its fisheries, the Syrian mandate, the control of sleeping-sickness in the Congo, cotton-growing in the country round Lake Tchad. “Why don’t you round out your survey of our possessions,” the minister suggested, “by taking a look at what we’ve accomplished in North Africa?” “The North African tour?” I asked, laughing. “Algiers, Constantine, and Tunis, with a side-trip to the Garden of Allah? Thank you, no. After what I’ve seen I’m afraid that I’d find that sort of thing pretty tame. Besides, I’ve already been to North Africa any number of times. I once spent a winter in Tunisia, and Algeria and I was in Morocco back in the bad old days when unsuccessful pretenders to the Shereefian throne were carried about the country in iron cages lashed to the backs of camels.”