A narrow white fringe of crumpled water leaped before the bows and formed on each side an ample band of tossing creamy surf, running back, swift as a mill-race. Behind the screw the carded, torn water rushed away like the stream below a cataract. On every side stretched a glassy sea, glassy save where we cut through it, and there it effervesced, and one could see myriads of white air-bubbles dancing below the surface and showing distinctly against the deep blue. I spent hours listening in the intervals between the rhythmic beats of the calm, pulsating engine, to the delicious fizz of the water, and watching the creamy foam that mantled on its surface, and the little, joyous, crested wavelets rushing back gracefully, like seanymphs, in feigned alarm from the rude touch of the keel.
The first astounding thing we noticed once we got out of sight of land was that there was no dust! Air — real air — without a solitary speck of dust! Was it possible?
The four correspondents, who had passed a year in Central Manchuria, looked in one another's eyes amazed, and all asked the same question simultaneously: M No dust? " It was almost disquieting. It was as if some ever-present phenomenon, absolutely necessary in the economy of nature, were by some strange chance missing; as if we had suddenly found ourselves in a sinless world.
How came it that we could at last see the blue sky above us, the white fleecy clouds? We seemed to be regarding nature through some wonderful optical instrument which heightened the colours, cleared the air, made all things marvellously and exuberantly distinct. For my own part, I felt as if I were looking again on the world of my childhood, that world which had all the glory and the unexpectedness of a new, brilliantly painted wooden horse, but which had, alas! for such a long time past been common, grey, and stale.
It is on occasions like this that one realises how much we owe to the sea. It makes nations clean, great, and adventurous. A single turn on the clean wind-swept deck of the Awa Maru, " fierce with the flavour of illimitable seas," is enough to show how this war was won, is better calculated than a cart-load of learned treatises to explain the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon.
And to imagine that few of these Russian soldiers have ever before gazed upon the sea! To-day ought to be a red-letter day in their lives, but, as a matter of fact, it isn't. Their minds have been too cramped by a long, vegetable-like existence in Siberia to be capable of solving at a glance the riddle of the Deep. As well expect a man who has never listened to music to appreciate Wagner at the first hearing.
In their attitude toward the sea these soldiers belong to the ancient world, to the school of Horace and Dr. Samuel Johnson. The only things in the ship that seem to interest them are the mysterious orifices from which they can get hot water to make tea.
There are on this ship two cabins superior to the others, and the Japanese have given both of them to the captured correspondents. The material comforts are beyond praise, and the consideration shown us makes us feel like princes. Really, it is not good for a war correspondent to get captured by the Japanese! He is liable to imagine that he is a minister plenipotentiary. He runs the risk of degenerating into a sybarite.
When Nippon next draws the sword I should not, however, advise any newspaper correspondent to get captured by the Japanese if he can help it; for Japan is on her good behaviour this time, and next time she can permit herself to indulge in the usual barbarities of Christian nations.