Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1935. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> THE SEASON was new too far advanced to contemplate going to Makalla. Summer had nearly come and in a few weeks the western monsoon would be beginning to blow so for the moment I gave up all idea of going to fetch the wood I needed for building my ship. The thought of having to fight my way back against the wind with a cumbersome cargo of planks and beama was anything but tempting. My dream though unfulfilled would remain a source of secret happiness giving me courage and strength to face life and wrest something from it. For men must always follow a dream no matter what. If fortune does not favour the old it is perhaps because they can no longer believe in those chimeras those mirages of the spirit which the young go for helter-skelter so sure of being able to reach them that obstacles fall under their unheeding feet before their existence has been suspected. At the end of the first volume of my memoirs I said I would speak at length of the shady means taken by the Government of Djibouti to have me condemned in 1915. At that time I believed in justice; I had the childlike credulity of a savage. A judge to me was a being of superior essence far above mere human emotions like hatred or envy and I could no more have doubted this than I could have doubted my own conscience. But alas my illusions soon lay in the dust and I sank into a quagmire of distress in which I floundered drearily seeking in vain for one patch of solid ground. When I read again my log-book written at this period the bitter words rise from the pages and renew those long-past sufferings. (SP)