But there are compensations. If the bards have been strangely and unaccountably irresponsive to the music of the waters, our great prose writers have caught its murmur and its meaning. Two particularly, John Bunyan and Rudyard Kipling, have given us the classics of the river. Bunyan's river--the river that all the pilgrims had to cross--is too familiar to need more than the merest mention. And as for Mr. Kipling, he, like Bunyan, is a writer of both poetry and prose. As a poet he has failed to do justice to the river, as all the poets have failed. He has given us a snippet, as all the poets have done. He makes the Thames tells its own tale, and a wonderful tale it is.
I remember the bat-winged lizard birds, The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds; And the giant tigers that stalked them down Through Regent's Park into Camden Town; And I remember like yesterday The earliest Cockney who came my way, When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand, With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
But I forgave Kipling for not having repaired the omission of the older poets when I read _Kim_. _Kim_ is the greatest story of a river that has ever been written. Who can forget the old lama and his long, long search for the River? Buddha, he thought, once took a bow and fired an arrow from its string, and, where that arrow fell, there sprang up a river 'whose nature, by our Lord's beneficence, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.' And so, through Mr. Kipling's four hundred vivid pages, there wanders the old lama, through city and rice-fields, over hills and across plains, asking, always asking, one everlasting question: 'The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?' All India, all the world seems to enter into that ceaseless cry. It is the deepest, oldest, latest cry of the universal heart: 'The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?' And it is the Church's unspeakable privilege to take the old lama's hand and to point his sparkling eyes to the cleansing fountains.
It was half-past ten! I had no idea it was so late! Our little camp was pitched about four miles up Captain's Gully, under the massive shelter of Bulman's Ridge. It had been a perfect, cloudless day; all our excursions--fishing, shooting, botanizing, and the rest--had been crowned with delightful success; and after supper we sat round the great camp fire, talking. We talked, of course, of the only things ever discussed around camp fires--old times and old faces. I was struck with the number of sentences that began '_I remember once----_.' Then, one by one, the others stole away to their tents--those little white tents that had looked like stray snowflakes in a wilderness of bush whenever we caught sight of them from the hills in the daytime, yet which seemed all the world to us at night. One by one, with a 'Here's off!' or a 'So long!' the others had slipped quietly away, and the fire and I were at last left to ourselves. How still it all was! Now and then I heard the queer cry of a mopoke up the gully; and once there was the swish of a bough beneath the leap of a 'possum. But, save for these, I could hear no sound but the subdued hissing and rumbling of the logs as they crumpled up in the fire before me. I remained for awhile, looking into the glowing embers; and there, in the dying fire, the faces of my companions all came back to me. And not theirs alone; for I saw, too, the old familiar faces of which we had been chatting, and a hundred others as well. It was then that I was startled by the 'possum in the branches overhead. I looked at my watch; it was half-past ten; and I too turned my back on the fire that had revealed so much. And I wondered, as I moved away to my tent, why, by the side of the fire, we always think of the Past, dream of the Past, talk of the Past. Why do our yesterdays all spring to new and glorious life when the flickering flames are lighting up our faces?