The Purple Cloud quotes

The Prophet in the twentieth century was not a success. John Baptist himself, camel-skin and all, would have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay from my mind with the thought: “He is behind his age, I suppose.”

But haven’t I thought differently of Mackay since, my God⁠ ⁠… ?

Three weeks—it was about that—before that Sunday night discourse, I was visited by Clark, the chief of the coming expedition—a mere visit of friendship. I had then been established about a year at No.

and One said: “Go not to see her now!” and the Other: “Yes, go, go!”

The two Voices of my life!

An ordinary person reading my words would undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory impulses—or else that I rave:

“But why?—if one does no harm. In these days of ‘the corruption of the upper classes,’ and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn’t every innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide?

Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine.

I find a sensuous pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs—like Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great antique women, who were all excellent chemists.

and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that night were like a fountain of tears.

For the firm land is health and sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the Power of Darkness.

I knew that I was at Franz Josef Land, somewhere or other in the neighbourhood of C.

I ran up with alacrity and took my stand at the wheel; and the bows of my eventful Argo turned southward and westward.

When I needed food or sleep, the ship slept, too: when I awoke, she continued her way.

Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel, overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees would give, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not contrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the …

But if I should find the land as still as the sea, without even the spouting whale, or school of tumbling sea-hogs—if Paris were dumber than the eternal ice—what then, I asked myself, should I do?

I could have made short work, and landed at Shetland, for I found myself as far westward as longitude 11° 23′ W.: but I would not: I was so afraid.

The shrinking within me to face that vague suspicion which I had, turned me first to a foreign land.

The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quite steep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water to their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay, and a modest, homely old town.

Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the Boreal. Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and his scythe mown.

I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an empty boat that lay at the ship’s side when she stopped; and I paddled twenty yards toward the little quay.

And when I saw that, I dropped down upon my knees at the capstan, and my poor heart sobbed out the frail cry:

“Well, Lord God, Thou hast destroyed the work of Thy hand⁠ ⁠…”

After a time I got up, went below in a state of somnambulism, took a packet of pemmican cakes, leapt to land, and went following the railway that runs from the Admiralty Pier.

and visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust; the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a mist, which was the coast of France.

It seemed too big for one poor man.

My head nodded. I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded, heavy-headed and weary: for it was too big for me.

Into what kind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so! What will have happened then? I may live five years—ten! What will have happened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty …”

Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me⁠ ⁠… !

I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the footpaths, and reached my shoulder.

and there are oils, and spices, fruits and bivalves, and soft-breathing Cyclades, and scarlet luxurious Orients. I will be restless and turbulent in my territories: and again, I will be languishing and fond. I will say to my soul: ‘Be Full.’ ”

I watch my mind, as in the old days I would watch a new precipitate in a test-tube, to see into what sediment it would settle.

I am very averse to trouble of any sort, so that the necessity for the simplest manual operations will rouse me to indignation:

In Gloucester, however, I found peas, asparagus, olives, and other greens, already prepared to be eaten without base cares: and these, I now see, exist everywhere in stores so vast comparatively to the needs of a single man, that they may be called infinite.

Everything, in fact, is infinite compared with my needs.

I take my meals, therefore, without more trouble than a man who had to carve his joint, or chicken: though even that little I sometimes find most irksome. There remains the detestable degradation of lighting fires for warmth, which I have occasionally to do:

and there is the rather visible paunch; and there is, oh good Heaven, the neat pink cravat—ah, it must have been that—the cravat—that made me burst out into laughter so loud, mocking, and uncontrollable the moment my eye rested there!

“Adam Jeffson,” I muttered reproachfully when it was over, “could that poor thing in the frame have been you?”

I cannot quite state why the tendency toward Orientalism—Oriental dress—all the manner of an Oriental monarch—has taken full possession of me: but so it is: for surely I am hardly any longer a Western, “modern” mind, but a primitive and Eastern one.

My ankles—my ten fingers—my wrists—are heavy with gold and silver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I bored three days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes for rings.

O Liberty! I am free.⁠ ⁠…

While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, at the very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square, this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seething in me:

But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that the present condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem the commonplace and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem so commonplace and natural—in nine months.

The mind of Adam Jeffson is adaptable.

I sat a long time thinking such things by my bed that night, till finally I was disposed to sleep there. But I had no considerable number of candlesticks, nor was even sure of candles.

I drove down three by-streets, till I turned into Euston Road: but I had no sooner reached it than I pulled up—with sudden jerk—with a shout of astonishment.

That cursed street was all lighted up and gay! and three shimmering electric globes, not far apart, illuminated every feature of a ghastly battlefield of dead.

And there was a thing there, the grinning impression of which I shall carry to my grave: a thing which spelled and spelled at me, and ceased, and began again, and ceased, and spelled at me.

“Metcalfe’s Stores”; and beneath the flag, stretched right across the house, was the thing which spelled, letter by letter, in letters of light: and it spelled two words, deliberately, coming to the end, and going back to recommence:

And that was the last word of civilised Man to me, Adam Jeffson⁠—its final counsel⁠—its ultimate gospel and message⁠—to me, my good God! Drink Roboral!

I was put into such a passion of rage by this blatant ribaldry, which affected me like the laughter of a skeleton, that I rushed from the car, with the intention, I believe, of seeking stones to stone it: but no stones were there:

and this planet will become one of the undisputed playgrounds of Hell, and the theatre of commotions stupendous as those witnessed on the face of Saturn.

The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth

: and I, poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. Upon her I brood, and do not cease, but brood and brood—the habit, if I remember right, first becoming fixed and fated during that long voyage eastward:

as I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet, aglow with luminous stones. I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, obese old Majesty.

Challenge me who will⁠—challenge me who dare!

Among those myriad worlds upon which I nightly pore, I may have my Peers and Compeers and Fellow-denizens … but here I am Sole; Earth acknowledges my ancient sway and hereditary sceptre:

Singular to say, my agitation, instead of intensifying to the point of apoplexy and death, now, at the actual sight, subsided to something very like calmness. With malign and sullen eye askance I stood, and steadily I watched her there.

She was on her knees, her palms lightly touching the ground, supporting her.

At the edge of the streamlet she knelt, and she was looking with a species of startled shy astonishment at the reflection of her face in the limpid brown water. And I, with sullen eye askance regarded her a good ten minutes’ space.

I did look then: and she was still quite near me, for the silly maniac had been running along the embankment, following me.

“Little fool!” I cried out across the water, “what are you after now?” And, oh my good God, shall I ever forget that strangeness, that wild strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human soul?

There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me. I turned the boat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her two stinging slaps, one on each cheek.

“Little fool!” I cried out across the water, “what are you after now?” And, oh my good God, shall I ever forget that strangeness, that wild strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human soul?

There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me.

I turned the boat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her two stinging slaps, one on each cheek.

Yesterday I noticed something queer about her, and soon discovered that she had been staining her lids with black kohl, like the hanums, so that, having found a box, she must have guessed its use from the pictures.

Wonderfully clever!⁠—imitative as a mirror.

Two mornings ago I found an old mother-of-pearl kittur, and sitting under the arcade, touched the strings, playing a simple air;

Thinking these things I climbed out, and we walked to Pera, where I slept in a great white-stone house in five or six acres of garden overlooking the cemetery of Kassim, having pointed out to the girl another house in which to sleep.

This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunless world hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only sky which she knew collapse at one point!

a hole appeared into yet a world beyond! It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set her free.

This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunless world hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only sky which she knew collapse at one point! a hole appeared into yet a world beyond!

It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set her free.

Ah, I see something now! I see! it was for this that I was preserved: I to be a sort of newfangled Adam—and this little creature to be my Eve! That is it! The White does not admit defeat: he would recommence the Race again!

“White Power shall not prevail,” said I.

“Hwhite Pow‑wer sall not‑fffail,” said she.

A thunder which roared as she said it seemed to me to go laughing through the universe, and a minute I looked upon her face with positive shrinking fear;

“Hwhite Pow‑wer sall not‑fffail,” said she.

A thunder which roared as she said it seemed to me to go laughing through the universe

, and a minute I looked upon her face with positive shrinking fear; till, starting up, I thrust her with violence from my path, and dashed forth to re-seek the palace and my bed.

“

I knew vely well that something was lipening over the cellar, or under, or alound it, and would come to pass at a certain fixed hour, and that I should see it, and feel it, and it would be vely nice.

”

“But you are one of them, I am another: yet you and I live here together, and we do no vices and climes.”

Her astounding shrewdness! Right into the inmost heart of a matter does her simple wit seem to pierce!

“No,” I said, “we do no vices and crimes, because we lack motive. There is no danger that we should hate each other, for we have plenty to eat and drink, dates, wines, and thousands of things. (Our danger is rather the other way.)

It is certain that if there had been no such question, there would have been no vices and climes, because you and I, who are just like them, do no vices and climes here, where there is no such question.”

The clear limelight of her intelligence! She wriggled on her seat in her effort of argument.

“I am not going to argue the matter,” I said. “There was that question of dates and wine, you see. And there always must be on an earth where millions of men, with varying degrees of cunning, reside.”

Probably every building on the island has been destroyed; the palace-platform, all cracked, leans half-sunken askew into the lake, like a huge stranded ark, while of the palace itself no trace remains, except a mound of gold stones emerging above the lake to the south.

Gone, gone⁠—sixteen years of vanity and vexation.

But from a practical point of view, what is a worst calamity of all is that the Speranza now lies high-and-dry in the village:

Still, I look forward with pleasure to our hour’s run to the Mainland, when I shall teach her to steer by the compass, and manipulate liquid-air, as I have taught her to dress, to talk, to cook, to write, to think, to live.

For she is my creation, this creature: as it were, a “rib from my side.”

But what is the design of this expulsion? And what was it that she called it last night?—“this new going out flom Halan!” “Haran,” I believe, being the place from which Abraham went out, when “called” by God.

and where it says, “truly the Light is Good (tob, bon),” this is as if it said, “truly the Di is Di.”

Such, at any rate, is the fatality that attends me, even in the smallest things: for this Western Eve, or Greek Leda, had twins.

Well, the next morning we crossed by the ruins of old Greek Phanar across the triple Stamboul-wall, which still showed its deep-ivied portal, and made our way, not without climbing, along the Golden Horn to the foot of the Old Seraglio, where I soon found …

“I suppose that nothing can happen so important as birth,” says she: “and perfumes must be ploper to birth, because the wise men blought spices to the young Jesus.”

This naivete was the cause of my immediate recovery: for to laugh is to be saved

: and I laughed right out, saying:

But they were too tloubled and sad, too awfully burdened: they had no chance at all. Such a queer, unnatulal feeling it gives me to lead of all that world: I can’t desclibe it; all their motives seem so tainted, their life so lopsided.

Tluely, the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint.

”

“Or seemed to,” says she—“for a time: as when a stleam flows north a little, and the sea is to the south: but it is bound for the sea all the time, and will turn again.

Destiny never could, and cannot yet, be judged, for it is not finished: and our lace should follow blindly whither it points, sure that thlough many curves it leads the world to our God.

”

She drew the shorter. …

This was only what I should have expected: for I knew that God loved her, and hated me.

But instantly upon the first shock of the enormity that I should be her executioner, I made my resolve: