HE world north of the Spanish parallels is more sane and less extravagant than the world south of them, less wonderful, too, if indeed one thing can be less wonderful than another in this most extraordinary world.
Starting from the North Pole and coming along down the 100th meridian of longitude a traveller from Mars would notice the change from the cold sobriety of Siberia to the warmer desolation of the Mongolian plains, but it would be about 40° North, the parallel that cuts the great loop of the Hoang Ho, that Earth would begin to hint of her secrets and tell of her marvels; of the little Gobi, of the Prayer-Wheels of Tibet, the temple bells of Burmah, the mysteries of Siam and the sun-blaze of Sumatra wherein he might walk at noon without casting a shadow.
He would see the rose turn to the lotus and the pine to the palm and the scrub of the Kuku-Nor Mountains to the Shan Forests and the mangroves of Malaya, passing, in fact, from world to world and reaching a world at last where Magic sits dealing with song and fire and passion and poison, filling with the dreams of the opium-eater the blossom of a flower and with the powers of hatred and destruction the seed of a fruit, which latter fact was brought home to me by Captain Jimmy Lasker, met with in the "Old Ship," a house of call not far from Meigg's wharf, San Francisco. The place is gone, gone like Bones and Sullivan's oyster-bar and Players, and with them have gone a race of men that will never be replaced. For now the tanker ties up where the Island schooners used to abide between their six months' trips and the iron grain ships fill themselves with Californian wheat through hose pipes, where the old Cape Horners hung, emptying themselves, or full and ready for their crews of Shanghaied men.
Lasker was old enough to remember the Three Brothers, that hardest of hard ships, old enough to remember copra before the soap companies had organised the trade. His father, Hiram, dated back before the time of Bully Hayes and Steinberger, and had been in sandalwood and taken his whack out of ; a Pacific family, one might say, whose memories, could they have been connected and strung out and put in print, would have furnished a book more interesting than any romance.
"The old man was a bit the other side of ordinary," said Captain Jimmy (he was talking of his father); "it wasn't so much cleverness as the way he had of seein' behind things, if you understand me. It wasn't scarcely natural. I reckon if he'd stuck to the land he'd have been President of the United States, for he could tell mostly what other chaps were thinking of, let alone doing behind his back, but he preferred Nature and God's good air, and the wharf rats and ship-chandlers and Port officers and Customs and such-like gave him all he wanted of mankind; and they never got the better of him—no, sir, they never got the better of him. When Juan—what's his name?—the President of one of them South American States, was howlin' for guns way back in the seventies to fight his neighbours with, dad took him the guns, Veterli rifles, worth their weight in Mexican dollars; took them out of 'Frisco harbour, contraband of war, right under the noses of the Customs and never paid a penny graft money. Dad was dead against bribery and corruption when he had to pay the bribes. Besides, it was a matter of intellect with him same as a game of chess, and when Juan diddled him of the dollars he done Juan in, in a way that'd take me half a day to tell you of. He didn't believe in Revenge and had no use for the word; he called it making his adjustments. He adjusted Bully Stevens in Omao with a bullet in his stomach for a black job Bully had done seven years before at Rapa down in the Paumotos; seven years was nothing to dad. He didn't believe in keeping wrath hot, believed in cold storage and always kept his adjustment gruel there, as many a man got to know who'd run crooked in dealings with dad.
"But what I've been telling you is rough stuff and doesn't show the workings of his mind, which was trickier than Billy Shakespeare's Puck, but what I'm going to tell you now is bearing on the point, and it's the frozen truth though it sounds a sight more like conjuring.