Far Away and Long Ago | Page 4

illness. Yet when it was over I looked back on those
six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so little of physical
pain. Never had I felt confinement less--I who feel, when I am out of
sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all
rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!
On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative ease,
I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had that far, that
forgotten past with me again as I had never previously had it. It was not
like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or
sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with
our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost
an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition and vanishes as
quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and
metaphor used at the beginning, it was as if the cloud shadows and haze
had passed away and the entire wide prospect beneath me made clearly
visible. Over it all my eyes could range at will, choosing this or that
point to dwell on, to examine it in all its details; and, in the case of
some person known to me as a child, to follow his life till it ended or
passed from sight; then to return to the same point again to repeat the
process with other lives and resume my rambles in the old familiar
haunts.
What a happiness it would be, I thought, in spite of discomfort and pain
and danger, if this vision would continue! It was not to be expected;
nevertheless it did not vanish, and on the second day I set myself to try
and save it from the oblivion which would presently cover it again.
Propped up with pillows I began with pencil and writing-pad to put it
down in some sort of order, and went on with it at intervals during the
whole six weeks of my confinement, and in this way produced the first

rough draft of the book.
And all this time I never ceased wondering at my own mental state; I
thought of it when, quickly tired, my trembling fingers dropped the
pencil; or when I woke from uneasy sleep to find the vision still before
me, inviting, insistently calling to me, to resume my childish rambles
and adventures of long ago in that strange world where I first saw the
light.
It was to me a marvellous experience; to be here, propped up with
pillows in a dimly-lighted room, the night-nurse idly dosing by the fire;
the sound of the everlasting wind in my ears, howling outside and
dashing the rain like hailstones against the window-panes; to be awake
to all this, feverish and ill and sore, conscious of my danger too, and at
the same time to be thousands of miles away, out in the sun and wind,
rejoicing in other sights and sounds, happy again with that ancient
long-lost and now recovered happiness!
During the three years that have passed since I had that strange
experience, I have from time to time, when in the mood, gone back to
the book and have had to cut it down a good deal and to reshape it, as
in the first draft it would have made too long and formless a history.
The house where I was born, on the South American pampas, was
quaintly named _Los Veinte-cinco Ombues,_ which means "The
Twenty-five Ombu Trees," there being just twenty-five of these
indigenous trees-- gigantic in size, and standing wide apart in a row
about 400 yards long. The ombu is a very singular tree indeed, and
being the only representative of tree-vegetation, natural to the soil, on
those great level plains, and having also many curious superstitions
connected with it, it is a romance in itself. It belongs to the rare
Phytolacca family, and has an immense girth--forty or fifty feet in some
cases; at the same time the wood is so soft and spongy that it can be cut
into with a knife, and is utterly unfit for firewood, for when cut up it
refuses to dry, but simply rots away like a ripe water-melon. It also
grows slowly, and its leaves, which are large, glossy and deep green,
like laurel leaves, are poisonous; and because of its uselessness it will
probably become extinct, like the graceful pampas grass in the same
region. In this exceedingly practical age men quickly lay the axe at the
root of things which, in their view, only cumber the ground; but before
other trees had been planted the antiquated and grand-looking ombu

had its uses; it served