FullReads

Whither have the pirates fled? Maybe some rumor of the great change reached them in their fastnesses; and then in the light of early dawn, in single file they climbed the ladder, up through the scuttle. And straddling the ridgepole with daggers between their teeth, alas, they became dizzy and toppled down the steep shingles to the gutter, to be whirled away in the torrent of an April shower. Ah me! Had only the roof been flat! Then it would have been for them a reservation where they might have lived on and waited for the sound of children’s feet to come again. Then when those feet had come and the old life had returned, then from aloft you would hear the old cry of Ship-ahoy, and you would know that at last your house had again slipped its moorings and was off to Madagascar or the Straits.

Where shall we adventure, to-day that we’re afloat,
Wary of the weather and steering by a star?
Shall it be to Africa, asteering of the boat,
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?

So a roof must be more than a cover. The roof of a boat, its deck, is arranged for occupation and is its best part. Consider the omnibus! Even it has seats on top, the best seats in fine weather. When Martin Chuzzlewit went up to London it was on the top of the coach he sat. Pickwick betook himself, gaiters, small-clothes, and all, to the roof. Even the immaculate Rollo scorned the inside seats. He sat on top, you may remember, and sucked oranges to ward off malaria, he and that prince of roisterers, Uncle George. De Quincey is the authority on mail coaches and for the roof seats he is all fire and enthusiasm. It happened once, to continue with De Quincey, that a state coach was presented by His Majesty George the Third of England, as a gift to the Chinese Emperor. This kind of vehicle being unknown in Peking, “it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state question, ‘Where was the Emperor to sit?’ The hammer cloth happened to be unusually gorgeous; and partly on that consideration, but partly also because the box offered the most elevated seat, was nearest the moon, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was the Imperial throne, and for the scoundrel who drove, he could sit where he could find a perch.”

Consider that the summer day has ended and that you are tired with its rush and heat. Up you must climb to your house-roof. On the rim of the sky is the blurred light from the steel furnaces at the city’s edge and, paneling this, stands a line of poplars stirring and sounding in the night wind.

Alone upon the house-top to the North
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky.

Is it fanciful to think that into the mind comes a little of the beauty of the older world when roofs were flat and men meditated under the stars and saw visions in the night?

Once upon a time I crossed the city of Nuremberg after dark; the market cleared of all traces of its morning sale, the “Schoener Brunnen” at its edge, the narrow defile leading to the citadel, the climb at the top. And then I came to an open parade above the town–“except the Schlosskirche Weathercock no biped stands so high.” The night had swept away all details of buildings. Nuremberg lay below like a dark etching, the centuries folded and creased in its obscurities. Then from some gaunt tower came a peal of bells, the hour maybe, and then an answering peal. “Thus stands the night,” they said; “thus stand the stars.” I was in the presence of Time and its black wings were brushing past me. What star was in the ascendant, I knew not. And yet in me I felt a throb that came by blind, circuitous ways from some far-off Chaldean temple, seven-storied in the night. In me was the blood of the star-gazer, my emotions recalling the rejected beliefs, the signs and wonders of the heavens. The waves of old thought had but lately receded from the world; and I, but a chink and hollow on the beach, had caught my drop of the ebbing ocean.