Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/228
for a hundred miles, always changing, yet always “the same, the same, and every day the same;” if you have ever voyaged up the Dusky River, in short, either in dreams or on the white deck of the tiny river steamer, you will remember the strange drowsy spell that overpowers the traveller. It is not so much what he sees as what he feels, that moves his spirit. The little iron vessel creeps over the rapids and round the cliff corners like some grotesque water insect seeking its prey. The silence of centuries has settled down on the forest. The immemorial whisper of the woods, the endless complaining of the river, sounds in his ears like the music of a dream; while the impassable barriers of rock, the ever-green clouds of foliage, the stooping fern-trees, slowly unroll before his eyes much as if they were all the unfading scenery of sleep itself.
To one traveller, at all events, on such a blazing afternoon of late summer, the somnolent spell of that green wilderness spoke with irresistible power. The warm smoky air came in lazy breaths with the current, and as he leaned over the rail and repeated slowly to himself—
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.”
He looked dreamily at the passing landscape.