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We drag at the oars with aching arms, and suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night - the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, from Tales of Land and Sea, Hanover House, Garden City, New York, 1916, p. 28.
TIME: late 19th century
PLACE: Java
CIRCUMSTANCE: first impressions of the East, the Orient
There was a murmur of voices in her, metallic hollow clangs of the engineroom, footsteps on the deck. Her ports shone, round like dilated eyes. Shapes moved about a shadowy man high up on the bridge. He heard my oars.
And then before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words, mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives- in English. The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, from Tales of Land and Sea, Hanover House, Garden City, New York, 1916, p.29.
TIME: late 19th century
PLACE: Java
CIRCUMSTANCE: the East speaks.
There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave .... We conversed in whispers, in low whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land. Guns, thunder, earthquakes would not have awakened the men just then.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, from Tales of Land and Sea, Hanover House, Garden City, New York, 1916, p.29.
TIME: late 19th century
PLACE: Java
CIRCUMSTANCE: first impressions of the East, the Orient.
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