Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian | Page 5

a chain of sea-mews or albatrosses.
The red casks indicating the channel swayed on the light wave with
gentle movement. Among the sails appeared every afternoon gigantic
grayish feather-like plumes of smoke. That was a steamer from New

York which brought passengers and goods to Aspinwall, drawing
behind it a frothy path of foam. On the other side of the balcony
Skavinski saw, as if on his palm, Aspinwall and its busy harbor, and in
it a forest of masts, boats, and craft; a little farther, white houses and
the towers of the town. From the height of his tower the small houses
were like the nests of sea- mews, the boats were like beetles, and the
people moved around like small points on the white stone boulevard.
From early morning a light eastern breeze brought a confused hum of
human life, above which predominated the whistle of steamers. In the
afternoon six o'clock came; the movement in the harbor began to cease;
the mews hid themselves in the rents of the cliffs; the waves grew
feeble and became in some sort lazy; and then on the land, on the sea,
and on the tower came a time of stillness unbroken by anything. The
yellow sands from which the waves had fallen back glittered like
golden stripes on the width of the waters; the body of the tower was
outlined definitely in blue. Floods of sunbeams were poured from the
sky on the water and the sands and the cliff. At that time a certain
lassitude full of sweetness seized the old man. He felt that the rest
which he was enjoying was excellent; and when he thought that it
would be continuous nothing was lacking to him.
Skavinski was intoxicated with his own happiness; and since a man
adapts himself easily to improved conditions, he gained faith and
confidence by degrees; for he thought that if men built houses for
invalids, why should not God gather up at last His own invalids? Time
passed, and confirmed him in this conviction. The old man grew
accustomed to his tower, to the lantern, to the rock, to the sand-bars, to
solitude. He grew accustomed also to the sea-mews which hatched in
the crevices of the rock, and in the evening held meetings on the roof of
the light- house. Skavinski threw to them generally the remnants of his
food; and soon they grew tame, and afterward, when he fed them, a real
storm of white wings encircled him, and the old man went among the
birds like a shepherd among sheep. When the tide ebbed he went to the
low sand-banks, on which he collected savory periwinkles and
beautiful pearl shells of the nautilus, which receding waves had left on
the sand. In the night by the moonlight and the tower he went to catch
fish, which frequented the windings of the cliff in myriads. At last he

was in love with his rocks and his treeless little island, grown over only
with small thick plants exuding sticky resin. The distant views repaid
him for the poverty of the island, however. During afternoon hours,
when the air became very clear he could see the whole isthmus covered
with the richest vegetation. It seemed to Skavinski at such times that he
saw one gigantic garden,--bunches of cocoa, and enormous musa,
combined as it were in luxurious tufted bouquets, right there behind the
houses of Aspinwall. Farther on, between Aspinwall and Panama, was
a great forest over which every morning and evening hung a reddish
haze of exhalations,--a real tropical forest with its feet in stagnant water,
interlaced with lianas and filled with the sound of one sea of gigantic
orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, gum-trees.
Through his field-glass the old man could see not only trees and the
broad leaves of bananas, but even legions of monkeys and great
marabous and flocks of parrots, rising at times like a rainbow cloud
over the forest. Skavinski knew such forests well, for after being
wrecked on the Amazon he had wandered whole weeks among similar
arches and thickets. He had seen how many dangers and deaths lie
concealed under those wonderful and smiling exteriors. During the
nights which he had spent in them he heard close at hand the sepulchral
voices of howling monkeys and the roaring of the jaguars; he saw
gigantic serpents coiled like lianas on trees; he knew those slumbering
forest lakes full of torpedo-fish and swarming with crocodiles; he knew
under what a yoke man lives in those unexplored wildernesses in which
are single leaves that exceed a man's size ten times,--wildernesses
swarming with blood-drinking mosquitoes, tree-leeches, and gigantic
poisonous spiders. He had experienced that forest life himself, had
witnessed it, had passed through it; therefore it gave him the greater
enjoyment to