At this rate his works will soon fill the habitable globe; and surely he was armed for better conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man’s fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.
Well, we begin to be the old fogies now; and it was high time something rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening: what will he do with them?
I am going to manage to send a long letter every month to Colvin, which, I dare say, if it is ever of the least interest, he will let you see. My wife is now better, and I hope will be reasonably right. We are a very crazy couple to lead so rough a life, but we manage excellently: she is handy and inventive, and I have one quality, I don’t grumble. The nearest I came was the other day: when I had finished dinner, I thought awhile, then had my horse saddled, rode down to Apia, and dined again – I must say with unblunted appetite; that is my best excuse. Goodbye, my dear James; find an hour to write to us, and register your letter. – Yours affectionately,
R.L.S.
6. Rudyard Kipling’s first stories were being published in the 1880s.
7. Stevenson is quoting, slightly inaccurately, from the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’. The lines should read ‘Let us roll all our strength and all/Our Sweetness up into one ball.’
Tuesday, Dec., 1891.
Sir, – I have the honour to report further explorations of the river Vaea, with accompanying sketch plan. The party under my command consisted of one horse, and was extremely insubordinate and mutinous, owing to not being used to go into the bush, and being half-broken anyway – and that the wrong half. The route indicated for my party was up to the bed of the so-called river Vaea, which I accordingly followed to a distance of perhaps two or three furlongs eastward from the house of Vailima, where the stream being quite dry, the bush thick, and the ground very difficult, I decided to leave the main body of the force under my command tied to a tree, and push on myself with the point of the advance guard, consisting of one man. The valley had become very narrow and airless; foliage close shut above; dry bed of the stream much excavated, so that I passed under fallen trees without stooping. Suddenly it turned sharp to the north, at right angles to its former direction; I heard living water, and came in view of a tall face of rock and the stream spraying down it; it might have been climbed, but it would have been dangerous, and I had to make my way up the steep earth banks, where there is nowhere any footing for man, only for trees, which made the rounds of my ladder. I was near the top of this climb, which was very hot and steep, and the pulses were buzzing all over my body, when I made sure there was one external sound in my ears, and paused to listen. No mistake; a sound of a mill-wheel thundering, I thought, close by yet below me, a huge mill-wheel, yet not going steadily, but with a schottisch1 movement, and at each fresh impetus shaking the mountain. There, where I was, I just put down the sound of the mystery of the bush; where no sound now surprises me – and any sound alarms; I only thought it would give Jack a fine fright, down where he stood tied to a tree by himself, and he was badly enough scared when I left him. The good folks at home identified it; it was a sharp earthquake.
At the top of the climb I made my way again to the watercourse; it is here running steady and pretty full; strange these intermittencies – and just a little below the main stream is quite dry, and all the original brook has gone down some lava gallery of the mountain – and just a little further below, it begins picking up from the left hand in little boggy tributaries, and in the inside of a hundred yards has grown a brook again. The general course of the brook was, I guess, s.e.; the valley still very deep and whelmed in wood. It seemed a swindle to have made so sheer a climb and still find yourself at the bottom of a well. But gradually the thing seemed to shallow, the trees to seem poorer and smaller; I could see more and more of the silver sprinkles of sky among the foliage instead of the sombre piling up of tree behind tree. And here I had two scares – first, away up on my right hand I heard a bull low; I think it was a bull from the quality of the low, which was singularly songful and beautiful; the bulls belong to me, but how did I know that the bull was aware of that? and my advance guard not being at all properly armed, we advanced with great precaution until I was satisfied that I was passing eastward of the enemy. It was during this period that a pool of the river suddenly boiled up in my face in a little fountain. It was in a very dreary, marshy part among dilapidated trees that you see through holes in the trunks of; and if any kind of beast or elf or devil had come out of that sudden silver ebullition I declare I do not think I should have been surprised. It was perhaps a thing as curious – a fish, with which these head waters of the stream are alive. They are some of them as long as my finger, should be easily caught in these shallows, and some day I’ll have a dish of them.
Very soon after I came to where the stream collects in another banana swamp, with the bananas bearing well. Beyond, the course is again quite dry; it mounts with a sharp turn a very steep face of the mountain, and then stops abruptly at the lip of the plateau, I suppose the top of Vaea mountain: plainly no more springs here – there was no smallest furrow of a watercourse beyond – and my task might be said to be accomplished. But such is the animated spirit in the service that the whole advance guard expressed a sentiment of disappointment that an exploration, so far successfully conducted, should come to stop in the most promising view of fresh successes. And though unprovided either with compass or cutlass, it was determined to push some way along the plateau, marking our direction by the laborious process of bending down, sitting upon, and thus breaking the wild cocoanut trees.
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