Chapter XXIII. Silence (1894-1898)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

The convulsion of 1893 left its victims in dead-water, and closed
much education. While the country braced itself up to an effort such
as no one had thought within its powers, the individual crawled as he
best could, through the wreck, and found many values of life upset.
But for connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four
years, 1893 to 1897, had no value in the drama of education, and
might be left out. Much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and
1890 perished in the ruin, and among the earliest wreckage had been
the fortunes of Clarence King. The lesson taught whatever the
bystander chose to read in it; but to Adams it seemed singularly full
of moral, if he could but understand it. In 1871 he had thought
King's education ideal, and his personal fitness unrivalled. No other
young American approached him for the combination of chances --
physical energy, social standing, mental scope and training, wit,
geniality, and science, that seemed superlatively American and
irresistibly strong. His nearest rival was Alexander Agassiz, and, as
far as their friends knew, no one else could be classed with them in
the running. The result of twenty years' effort proved that the
theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails -- for
want of money. Even Henry Adams, who kept himself, as he thought,
quite outside of every possible financial risk, had been caught in
the cogs, and held for months over the gulf of bankruptcy, saved only
by the chance that the whole class of millionaires were more or less
bankrupt too, and the banks were forced to let the mice escape with
the rats; but, in sum, education without capital could always be
taken by the throat and forced to disgorge its gains, nor was it
helped by the knowledge that no one intended it, but that all alike
suffered. Whether voluntary or mechanical the result for education
was the same. The failure of the scientific scheme, without money to
back it, was flagrant.

The scientific scheme in theory was alone sound, for science
should be equivalent to money; in practice science was helpless
without money. The weak holder was, in his own language, sure to be
frozen out. Education must fit the complex conditions of a new
society, always accelerating its movement, and its fitness could be
known only from success. One looked about for examples of success
among the educated of one's time -- the men born in the thirties, and
trained to professions. Within one's immediate acquaintance, three
were typical: John Hay, Whitelaw Reid, and William C. Whitney; all of
whom owed their free hand to marriage, education serving only for
ornament, but among whom, in 1893, William C. Whitney was far and
away the most popular type.

Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was
exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich
for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might
occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them,
and never showed them respect. Scarcely one of the very rich men held
any position in society by virtue of his wealth, or could have been
elected to an office, or even into a good club. Setting aside the
few, like Pierpont Morgan, whose social position had little to do
with greater or less wealth, riches were in New York no object of
envy on account of the joys they brought in their train, and Whitney
was not even one of the very rich; yet in his case the envy was
palpable. There was reason for it. Already in 1893 Whitney had
finished with politics after having gratified every ambition, and
swung the country almost at his will; he had thrown away the usual
objects of political ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes;
had turned to other amusements, satiated every taste, gorged every
appetite, won every object that New York afforded, and, not yet
satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad, until New York
no longer knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. He had
succeeded precisely where Clarence King had failed.

Barely forty years had passed since all these men started in a
bunch to race for power, and the results were fixed beyond reversal;
but one knew no better in 1894 than in 1854 what an American
education ought to be in order to count as success. Even granting
that it counted as money, its value could not be called general.
America contained scores of men worth five millions or upwards, whose
lives were no more worth living than those of their cooks, and to
whom the task of making money equivalent to education offered more
difficulties than to Adams the task of making education equivalent to
money. Social position seemed to have value still, while education
counted for nothing. A mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician,
engineer, if fortunate might average a value of ten dollars a day in
the open market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediaeval
qualities of energy and will, but no education beyond his special
branch, would probably be worth at least ten times as much. Society
had failed to discover what sort of education suited it best. Wealth
valued social position and classical education as highly as either of
these valued wealth, and the women still tended to keep the scales
even. For anything Adams could see he was himself as contented as
though he had been educated; while Clarence King, whose education was
exactly suited to theory, had failed; and Whitney, who was no better
educated than Adams, had achieved phenomenal success.

Had Adams in 1894 been starting in life as he did in 1854, he
must have repeated that all he asked of education was the facile use
of the four old tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With
these he could still make his way to any object within his vision,
and would have a decisive advantage over nine rivals in ten.
Statesman or lawyer, chemist or electrician, priest or professor,
native or foreign, he would fear none.

King's breakdown, physical as well as financial, brought the
indirect gain to Adams that, on recovering strength, King induced him
to go to Cuba, where, in January, 1894, they drifted into the little
town of Santiago. The picturesque Cuban society, which King knew
well, was more amusing than any other that one had yet discovered in
the whole broad world, but made no profession of teaching anything
unless it were Cuban Spanish or the danza; and neither on his own nor
on King's account did the visitor ask any loftier study than that of
the buzzards floating on the trade-wind down the valley to Dos Bocas,
or the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran
Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old and
revolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had
never been solid, fell on their heads and drew them with it into an
ocean of mischief. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires
were always falling on one's head, and, of all lessons, these
constant political convulsions taught least. Since the time of
Rameses, revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but
they have sometimes the merit of changing one's point of view, and
the Cuban rebellion served to sever the last tie that attached Adams
to a Democratic administration. He thought that President Cleveland
could have settled the Cuban question, without war, had he chosen to
do his duty, and this feeling, generally held by the Democratic
Party, joined with the stress of economical needs and the gold
standard to break into bits the old organization and to leave no
choice between parties. The new American, whether consciously or not,
had turned his back on the nineteenth century before he was done with
it; the gold standard, the protective system, and the laws of mass
could have no other outcome, and, as so often before, the movement,
once accelerated by attempting to impede it, had the additional,
brutal consequence of crushing equally the good and the bad that
stood in its way.

The lesson was old -- so old that it became tedious. One had
studied nothing else since childhood, and wearied of it. For yet
another year Adams lingered on these outskirts of the vortex, among
the picturesque, primitive types of a world which had never been
fairly involved in the general motion, and were the more amusing for
their torpor. After passing the winter with King in the West Indies,
he passed the summer with Hay in the Yellowstone, and found there
little to study. The Geysers were an old story; the Snake River posed
no vital statistics except in its fordings; even the Tetons were as
calm as they were lovely; while the wapiti and bear, innocent of
strikes and corners, laid no traps. In return the party treated them
with affection. Never did a band less bloody or bloodthirsty wander
over the roof of the continent. Hay loved as little as Adams did, the
labor of skinning and butchering big game; he had even outgrown the
sedate, middle-aged, meditative joy of duck-shooting, and found the
trout of the Yellowstone too easy a prey. Hallett Phillips himself,
who managed the party loved to play Indian hunter without hunting so
much as a fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist was reduced to shooting
only for the table, and the guileless prattle of Billy Hofer alone
taught the simple life. Compared with the Rockies of 1871, the sense
of wildness had vanished; one saw no possible adventures except to
break one's neck as in chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more
intelligent ponies scented an occasional friendly and sociable
bear.

When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway systems
yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and no sooner
had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography than with
desperate thirst for exhausting the American field, he set out for
Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean and clearing up,
in these six or eight months, at least twenty thousand miles of
American land and water.

He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life -- tropical
islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde types.
Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque than
civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's sixtieth year
approached, the artist began to die; only a certain intense cerebral
restlessness survived which no longer responded to sensual
stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art were a
trotting-match. For this, one was in some degree prepared, for the
old man had been a stage-type since drama began; but one felt some
perplexity to account for failure on the opposite or mechanical side,
where nothing but cerebral action was needed.

Taking for granted that the alternative to art was arithmetic,
plunged deep into statistics, fancying that education would find the
surest bottom there; and the study proved the easiest he had ever
approached. Even the Government volunteered unlimited statistics,
endless columns of figures, bottomless averages merely for the
asking. At the Statistical Bureau, Worthington Ford supplied any
material that curiosity could imagine for filling the vast gaps of
ignorance, and methods for applying the plasters of fact. One seemed
for a while to be winning ground, and one's averages projected
themselves as laws into the future. Perhaps the most perplexing part
of the study lay in the attitude of the statisticians, who showed no
enthusiastic confidence in their own figures. They should have
reached certainty, but they talked like other men who knew less. The
method did not result faith. Indeed, every increase of mass -- of
volume and velocity -- seemed to bring in new elements, and, at last,
a scholar, fresh in arithmetic and ignorant of algebra, fell into a
superstitious terror of complexity as the sink of facts. Nothing came
out as it should. In principle, according to figures, any one could
set up or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of
satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or
to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic
imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of
every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective
overthrow of every society that seemed possible in the future; but
meanwhile these societies which violated every law, moral,
arithmetical, and economical, not only propagated each other, but
produced also fresh complexities with every propagation and developed
mass with every complexity.

The human factor was worse still. Since the stupefying discovery
of Pteraspis in 1867, nothing had so confused the student as the
conduct of mankind in the fin-de-siecle. No one seemed very much
concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the
anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present. Adams
disliked the present as much as they did, and his interest in future
society was becoming slight, yet he was kept alive by irritation at
finding his life so thin and fruitless. Meanwhile he watched mankind
march on, like a train of pack-horses on the Snake River, tumbling
from one morass into another, and at short intervals, for no reason
but temper, falling to butchery, like Cain. Since 1850, massacres had
become so common that society scarcely noticed them unless they
summed up hundreds of thousands, as in Armenia; wars had been almost
continuous, and were beginning again in Cuba, threatening in South
Africa, and possible in Manchuria; yet impartial judges thought them
all not merely unnecessary, but foolish -- induced by greed of the
coarsest class, as though the Pharaohs or the Romans were still
robbing their neighbors. The robbery might be natural and inevitable,
but the murder seemed altogether archaic.

At one moment of perplexity to account for this trait of
Pteraspis, or shark, which seemed to have survived every moral
improvement of society, he took to study of the religious press.
Possibly growth m human nature might show itself there. He found no
need to speak unkindly of it; but, as an agent of motion, he
preferred on the whole the vigor of the shark, with its chances of
betterment; and he very gravely doubted, from his aching
consciousness of religious void, whether any large fraction of
society cared for a future life, or even for the present one, thirty
years hence. Not an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth
of faith or hope.

The object of education, therefore, was changed. For many years
it had lost itself in studying what the world had ceased to care for;
if it were to begin again, it must try to find out what the mass of
mankind did care for, and why. Religion, politics, statistics, travel
had thus far led to nothing. Even the Chicago Fair had only confused
the roads. Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind
was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of
chance images stored away without order in the memory. One might as
well try to educate a gravel-pit. The task was futile, which
disturbed a student less than the discovery that, in pursuing it, he
was becoming himself ridiculous. Nothing is more tiresome than a
superannuated pedagogue.

For the moment he was rescued, as often before, by a woman.
Towards midsummer, 1895, Mrs. Cabot Lodge bade him follow her to
Europe with the Senator and her two sons. The study of history is
useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women; and
the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with
what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever
been known. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong,
and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured
herself. The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only
as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of
the eighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can
ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this
is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth
century was much better company than the American man; she was
probably much better company than her grandmothers. With Mrs. Lodge
and her husband, Senator since 1893, Adams's relations had been those
of elder brother or uncle since 1871 when Cabot Lodge had left his
examination-papers on Assistant Professor Adams's desk, and crossed
the street to Christ Church in Cambridge to get married. With Lodge
himself, as scholar, fellow instructor, co-editor of the North
American Review, and political reformer from 1873 to 1878, he had
worked intimately, but with him afterwards as politician he had not
much relation; and since Lodge had suffered what Adams thought the
misfortune of becoming not only a Senator but a Senator from
Massachusetts -- a singular social relation which Adams had known
only as fatal to friends -- a superstitious student, intimate with
the laws of historical fatality, would rather have recognized him
only as an enemy; but apart from this accident he valued Lodge
highly, and in the waste places of average humanity had been greatly
dependent on his house. Senators can never be approached with safety,
but a Senator who has a very superior wife and several superior
children who feel no deference for Senators as such, may be
approached at times with relative impunity while they keep him under
restraint.

Where Mrs. Lodge summoned, one followed with gratitude, and so
it chanced that in August one found one's self for the first time at
Caen, Coutances, and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. If history had a
chapter with which he thought himself familiar, it was the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries; yet so little has labor to do with
knowledge that these bare playgrounds of the lecture system turned
into green and verdurous virgin forests merely through the medium of
younger eyes and fresher minds. His German bias must have given his
youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had
thought unessential because un-German. They breathed native air in
the Normandy of 1200, a compliment which would have seemed to the
Senator lacking in taste or even in sense when addressed to one of a
class of men who passed life in trying to persuade themselves and the
public that they breathed nothing less American than a blizzard; but
this atmosphere, in the touch of a real emotion, betrayed the
unconscious humor of the senatorial mind. In the thirteenth century,
by an unusual chance, even a Senator became natural, simple,
interested, cultivated, artistic, liberal -- genial.

Through the Lodge eyes the old problem became new and personal;
it threw off all association with the German lecture-room. One could
not at first see what this novelty meant; it had the air of mere
antiquarian emotion like Wenlock Abbey and Pteraspis; but it expelled
archaic law and antiquarianism once for all, without seeming
conscious of it; and Adams drifted back to Washington with a new
sense of history. Again he wandered south, and in April returned to
Mexico with the Camerons to study the charms of pulque and
Churriguerresque architecture. In May he ran through Europe again
with Hay, as far south as Ravenna. There came the end of the passage.
After thus covering once more, in 1896, many thousand miles of the
old trails, Adams went home October, with every one else, to elect
McKinley President and start the world anew.

For the old world of public men and measures since 1870, Adams
wept no tears. Within or without, during or after it, as partisan or
historian, he never saw anything to admire in it, or anything he
wanted to save; and in this respect he reflected only the public mind
which balanced itself so exactly between the unpopularity of both
parties as to express no sympathy with either. Even among the most
powerful men of that generation he knew none who had a good word to
say for it. No period so thoroughly ordinary had been known in
American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the
balance of American society; but the natural result of such lack of
interest in public affairs, in a small society like that of
Washington, led an idle bystander to depend abjectly on intimacy of
private relation. One dragged one's self down the long vista of
Pennsylvania Avenue, by leaning heavily on one's friends, and
avoiding to look at anything else. Thus life had grown narrow with
years, more and more concentrated on the circle of houses round La
Fayette Square, which had no direct or personal share in power except
in the case of Mr. Blaine whose tumultuous struggle for existence
held him apart. Suddenly Mr. McKinley entered the White House and
laid his hand heavily on this special group. In a moment the whole
nest so slowly constructed, was torn to pieces and scattered over the
world. Adams found himself alone. John Hay took his orders for
London. Rockhill departed to Athens. Cecil Spring-Rice had been
buried in Persia. Cameron refused to remain in public life either at
home or abroad, and broke up his house on the Square. Only the Lodges
and Roosevelts remained, but even they were at once absorbed in the
interests of power. Since 1861, no such social convulsion had
occurred.

Even this was not quite the worst. To one whose interests lay
chiefly in foreign affairs, and who, at this moment, felt most
strongly the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos, the
man in the State Department seemed more important than the man in the
White House. Adams knew no one in the United States fit to manage
these matters in the face of a hostile Europe, and had no candidate
to propose; but he was shocked beyond all restraints of expression to
learn that the President meant to put Senator John Sherman in the
State Department in order to make a place for Mr. Hanna in the
Senate. Grant himself had done nothing that seemed so bad as this to
one who had lived long enough to distinguish between the ways of
presidential jobbery, if not between the jobs. John Sherman,
otherwise admirably fitted for the place, a friendly influence for
nearly forty years, was notoriously feeble and quite senile, so that
the intrigue seemed to Adams the betrayal of an old friend as well as
of the State Department. One might have shrugged one's shoulders had
the President named Mr. Hanna his Secretary of State, for Mr. Hanna
was a man of force if not of experience, and selections much worse
than this had often turned out well enough; but John Sherman must
inevitably and tragically break down.

The prospect for once was not less vile than the men. One can
bear coldly the jobbery of enemies, but not that of friends, and to
Adams this kind of jobbery seemed always infinitely worse than all
the petty money bribes ever exploited by the newspapers. Nor was the
matter improved by hints that the President might call John Hay to
the Department whenever John Sherman should retire. Indeed, had Hay
been even unconsciously party to such an intrigue, he would have put
an end, once for all, to further concern in public affairs on his
friend's part; but even without this last disaster, one felt that
Washington had become no longer habitable. Nothing was left there but
solitary contemplation of Mr. McKinley's ways which were not likely
to be more amusing than the ways of his predecessors; or of
senatorial ways, which offered no novelty of what the French language
expressively calls embetement; or of poor Mr. Sherman's ways which
would surely cause anguish to his friends. Once more, one must go!

Nothing was easier! On and off, one had done the same thing
since the year 1858, at frequent intervals, and had now reached the
month of March, 1897; yet, as the whole result of six years' dogged
effort to begin a new education, one could not recommend it to the
young. The outlook lacked hope. The object of travel had become more
and more dim, ever since the gibbering ghost of the Civil Law had
been locked in its dark closet, as far back as 1860. Noah's dove had
not searched the earth for resting-places so carefully, or with so
little success. Any spot on land or water satisfies a dove who wants
and finds rest; but no perch suits a dove of sixty years old, alone
and uneducated, who has lost his taste even for olives. To this,
also, the young may be driven, as education, end the lesson fails in
humor; but it may be worth knowing to some of them that the planet
offers hardly a dozen places where an elderly man can pass a week
alone without ennui, and none at all where he can pass a year.

Irritated by such complaints, the world naturally answers that
no man of sixty should live, which is doubtless true, though not
original. The man of sixty, with a certain irritability proper to his
years, retorts that the world has no business to throw on him the
task of removing its carrion, and that while he remains he has a
right to require amusement -- or at least education, since this costs
nothing to any one -- and that a world which cannot educate, will not
amuse, and is ugly besides, has even less right to exist than he.
Both views seem sound; but the world wearily objects to be called by
epithets what society always admits in practice; for no one likes to
be told that he is a bore, or ignorant, or even ugly; and having
nothing to say in its defence, it rejoins that, whatever license is
pardonable in youth, the man of sixty who wishes consideration had
better hold his tongue. This truth also has the defect of being too
true. The rule holds equally for men of half that age Only the very
young have the right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding.
Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves.

Exceptions are plenty on both sides, as the Senate knew to its
acute suffering; but young or old, women or men, seemed agreed on one
point with singular unanimity; each praised silence in others. Of all
characteristics in human nature, this has been one of the most
abiding. Mere superficial gleaning of what, in the long history of
human expression, has been said by the fool or unsaid by the wise,
shows that, for once, no difference of opinion has ever existed on
this. "Even a fool," said the wisest of men, "when he holdeth his
peace, is counted wise," and still more often, the wisest of men,
when he spoke the highest wisdom, has been counted a fool. They
agreed only on the merits of silence in others. Socrates made remarks
in its favor, which should have struck the Athenians as new to them;
but of late the repetition had grown tiresome. Thomas Carlyle
vociferated his admiration of it. Matthew Arnold thought it the best
form of expression; and Adams thought Matthew Arnold the best form of
expression in his time. Algernon Swinburne called it the most noble
to the end. Alfred de Vigny's dying wolf remarked: --

"A voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce qu'on laisse, Seul
le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse." "When one
thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, Only silence
is strong, -- all the rest is but lies." Even Byron, whom a more
brilliant era of genius seemed to have decided to be but an
indifferent poet, had ventured to affirm that --

"The Alp's snow summit nearer heaven is seen Than the
volcano's fierce eruptive crest;" with other verses, to the effect
that words are but a "temporary torturing flame"; of which no one
knew more than himself. The evidence of the poets could not be more
emphatic: --

"Silent, while years engrave the brow! Silent, -- the best
are silent now!" Although none of these great geniuses had shown
faith in silence as a cure for their own ills or ignorance, all of
them, and all philosophy after them, affirmed that no man, even at
sixty, had ever been known to attain knowledge; but that a very few
were believed to have attained ignorance, which was in result the
same. More than this, in every society worth the name, the man of
sixty had been encouraged to ride this hobby -- the Pursuit of
Ignorance in Silence -- as though it were the easiest way to get rid
of him. In America the silence was more oppressive than the
ignorance; but perhaps elsewhere the world might still hide some
haunt of futilitarian silence where content reigned -- although long
search had not revealed it -- and so the pilgrimage began anew!

The first step led to London where John Hay was to be
established. One had seen so many American Ministers received in
London that the Lord Chamberlain himself scarcely knew more about it;
education could not be expected there; but there Adams arrived, April
21, 1897, as though thirty-six years were so many days, for Queen
Victoria still reigned and one saw little change in St. James's
Street. True, Carlton House Terrace, like the streets of Rome,
actually squeaked and gibbered with ghosts, till one felt like
Odysseus before the press of shadows, daunted by a "bloodless fear";
but in spring London is pleasant, and it was more cheery than ever in
May, 1897, when every one was welcoming the return of life after the
long winter since 1893. One's fortunes, or one's friends' fortunes,
were again in flood.

This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found one's self
the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars
better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled
Tannhauser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to
show him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a
sort of impertinence. He slipped away to Paris, and set up a
household at St. Germain where he taught and learned French history
for nieces who swarmed under the venerable cedars of the Pavillon
d'Angouleme, and rode about the green forest-alleys of St. Germain
and Marly. From time to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing
occurred to break the summer-peace of the stranded Tannhauser, who
slowly began to feel at home in France as in other countries he had
thought more homelike. At length, like other dead Americans, he went
to Paris because he could go nowhere else, and lingered there till
the Hays came by, in January, 1898; and Mrs. Hay, who had been a
stanch and strong ally for twenty years, bade him go with them to
Egypt.

Adams cared little to see Egypt again, but he was glad to see
Hay, and readily drifted after him to the Nile. What they saw and
what they said had as little to do with education as possible, until
one evening, as they were looking at the sun set across the Nile from
Assouan, Spencer Eddy brought them a telegram to announce the sinking
of the Maine in Havana Harbor. This was the greatest stride in
education since 1865, but what did it teach? One leant on a fragment
of column in the great hall at Karnak and watched a jackal creep down
the debris of ruin. The jackal's ancestors had surely crept up the
same wall when it was building. What was his view about the value of
silence? One lay in the sands and watched the expression of the
Sphinx. Brooks Adams had taught him that the relation between
civilizations was that of trade. Henry wandered, or was storm-driven,
down the coast. He tried to trace out the ancient harbor of Ephesus.
He went over to Athens, picked up Rockhill, and searched for the
harbor of Tiryns; together they went on to Constantinople and studied
the great walls of Constantine and the greater domes of Justinian.
His hobby had turned into a camel, and he hoped, if he rode long
enough in silence, that at last he might come on a city of thought
along the great highways of exchange.