Waiting for Daylight

ows quite rightly that places like the British Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense. Our kingdom is earth, sour and worm-riddled earth, with all its aborigin

am sure he would have mentioned had he

gan it, but in leisure recall the fearful spell of islands in the Greek legends. It is easily understood. If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to be seen but the silent fountains of t

. It was a frail ghost of land on that hard blue plain, and had a light of its own; but it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked for its name. "Alboran," he said, very quietly, without looking at it, as though keeping something

that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It was a dream com