[Gutenberg 45964] • Day and Night Stories

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1917 Excerpt: ... IV INITIATION A Few years ago, on a Black Sea steamer heading for the Caucasus, I fell into conversation with an American. He mentioned that he was on his way to the Baku oilfields, and I replied that I was going up into the mountains. He looked at me questioningly a moment. "Your first trip?" he asked with interest. I said it was. A conversation followed; it was continued the next day, and renewed the following day, until we parted company at Batoum. I don't know why he talked so freely to me in particular. Normally, he was a taciturn, silent man. We had been fellow travellers from Marseilles, but after Constantinople we had the boat pretty much to ourselves. What struck me about him was his vehement, almost passionate, love of natural beauty--in seas and woods and sky, but above all in mountains. It was like a religion in him. His taciturn manner hid deep poetic feeling. And he told me it had not always been so with him. A kind of friendship sprang up between us. He was a New York business man--buying and selling exchange between banks--but was English born. He had gone out thirty years before, and become naturalised. His talk was exceedingly "American," slangy, and almost Western. 1 le said he had roughed it in the West for a year or two first. But what he chiefly talked about was mountains. He said it was in the mountains an unusual experience had come to him that had opened his eyes to many things, but principally to the beauty that was now everything to him, and to the--insignificance of death. lie V he Caucasus well where I was going. I think that was why he was interested in me and my journey. "Up there," he said, "you'll feel things--and maybe find out things you never knew before." "What kind of things?" I asked. "Why, for one," he replied with em...