The Journeying Moon: Sailing Into History by Ernle Bradford

Author:Ernle Bradford [Bradford, Ernle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Special Interest, Adventure, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Europe, France
ISBN: 9781497617339
Google: AbEfAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T23:49:31.246811+00:00

And you know what happened to poor Coleridge!’

There was a full moon the night we left Hydra and set course northward; a full moon, and the voices singing in the tavernas, and the timeless feeling of old defeats, and the steady continuance of life at a level where poverty was met with dignity. In those warm lands it is still possible to be poor and dignified. Success has not entirely been equated with the size of one’s bank balance.

Theodore was swaying on the jetty. He had two or three other friends with him. We had all had plenty to drink, and the night seemed luminous with boundless possibilities. It was like Youth—wine had charged our hopes, and cut us free from the narrow limits within which life is normally lived.

‘Come back again!’ they shouted as we slanted out down the bright moon track, and ran up the sails.

‘We will!’ I answered. But deep down I knew that we never would.

Weeks later—it was the night before we left Corfu and set our bows westward for Malta—I was sitting in the saloon trying to sort out my impressions of Greece. They were so vivid that I felt as if all my life had been meaningless in comparison with those past few months.

Sometimes, even nowadays several years later, I wake at nights—no matter what part of the world I am in—and I come out of a deep dream of Greece. I think I must dream of that sea and those islands more often even than I remember. Sometimes, when the alarm clock sounds and the thunder of a big city calls me back to the hard task that we all must face of living life as we must—sometimes it seems as if I have left reality behind me and that this ‘real’ world in which I live is more insubstantial than any dream.

I was sitting in the saloon then, that night in Corfu, and sorting through my diary and notebooks. Janet was busy in the galley. There was a lot of laughter and noise on the quayside; two British destroyers were in harbour on a courtesy visit.

There was the dawn over Delos that I remembered so vividly, the morning when we had climbed Mount Cynthus and watched the sun rise over the Aegean. We had seen the water change from pewter to lilac until the sun touched our feet in the temple where we stood.

There were the winnowers of Santorin—the figures of the women on a golden evening, sifting the chaff from the grain with long, flail-like scoops. I remember the chaff drifting away down-wind to powder the small green vines. There was the night we slept out under the stars at Delphi and heard the oracle tell us that things must get far worse in the world before they would ever get better—and that we should never live to see the better days.

At Mycenae in Agamemnon’s tomb the bearded face under the golden helmet had spoken of war, and had laughed at welfare states.

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