Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading shyly toward the Quai Francois Joseph.  He slipped through the barrier gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman’s course along the shining Canal toward the black wall of a German mail-boat.  Cramping the Arab’s oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage.  Safe on deck, he became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here and there with a half-military salute.  All afternoon he sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching southward into the unknown.

He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book.  He recalled famous exiles—­Camoens, Napoleon, Byron—­and essayed to copy something of all three in his attitude.  He cherished the thought that he, clerk at twenty-one, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward a house with servants, off there beyond the turn of the Canal, beyond the curve of the globe.  But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young, homesick, timid of the future, and already oppressed with the distance, the age, the manifold, placid mystery of China.

Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep.  Behind her, houses, multi-colored funnels, scrubby trees, slowly swung to blot out the glowing Mediterranean and the western hemisphere.  Gray desert banks closed in upon her strictly, slid gently astern, drawing with them to the vanishing-point the bright lane of traversed water.  She gained the Bitter Lakes; and the red conical buoys, like beads a-stringing, slipped on and added to the two converging dotted lines.

“Good-by to the West!” thought Rudolph.  As he mourned sentimentally at this lengthening tally of their departure, and tried to quote appropriate farewells, he was deeply touched and pleased by the sadness of his emotions.  “Now what does Byron say?”

The sombre glow of romantic sentiment faded, however, with the sunset.  That evening, as the ship glided from ruby coal to ruby coal of the gares, following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the deck in a mood much simpler and more honest.  In vain he tried the half-baked philosophy of youth.  It gave no comfort; and watching the clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man’s world.  His own career seemed no more dubious than trivial.

Succeeding days only strengthened this mood.  The Red Sea passed in a dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast, faint and distant.  Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and then, suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.