From my high window in central Dockland, as from a watch tower, I look out over a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a volcanic desert, inhabited only by sparrows and pigeons.  Humanity burrows in swarms below that surface of crags, but only faint cries tell me that the rocks are caverned and inhabited, that life flows there unseen through subterranean galleries.  Often, when the sunrise over the roofs is certainly the coming of Aurora, as though then the first illumination of the sky heralded the veritable dayspring for which we look, and the gods were nearly here, I have watched for that crust beneath, which seals the sleepers under, to heave and roll, to burst, and for released humanity to pour through fractures, from the lower dark, to be renewed in the fires of the morning.  Nothing has happened yet.  But I am confident it would repay society to appoint another watcher when I am gone, to keep an eye on the place.

Right below my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags of chimneys, with a crevasse between them to which I can see no bottom.  But a roadway is there.  From an acute angle of the window a cornice overhangs a sheer fall of cliff.  That is as near the ground as can be got from my outlook.  Several superior peaks rise out of the wilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middle distance, where smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock warehouses, a continuous range of far dark heights.  I have thoughts of a venturesome and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and all the way to the distant mountains.  It looks inviting, and possible, by moonlight.  And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child’s dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean.  From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve.  The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man’s handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die.  You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form.  I doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display on their roofs.

My eyes more frequently go to one place in that high country.  In that distant line of warehouses is a break, and there occasionally I see the masts and spars of a tall ship, and I remember that beyond my dark horizon of warehouses is the path down which she has come from the Indies to Blackwall.  I said we were not inland.  Cassiopeia is in that direction, and China over there.

For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland.  I call it the centre of the world.  Our high road is part of the main thoroughfare from Kensington to Valparaiso.  Every wanderer must come this way at least once in his life.  We are the hub whence all roads go to the circumference.  A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of distress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost, casting its people adrift on the blind tides.