Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny. I had just come back from the land which Europe had reconquered, and which, please God, she shall continually hold, and I said to myself, “Remain for ever.” “We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens to this life of ours, which we had from you, _Salvâ Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world.” It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “_Esto perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die”; and remembering this I have determined to give my rambling book that title. * * * * * [Sidenote: It Dawns] In a little while it began to be dawn; but as yet I saw no land. I saw before me a boundary of waters tumbling all about, but I did not feel alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a man feels on some lake inland, knowing well that there is governed country upon every side. This is the way in which a man leaves Africa and comes back to the shore which Christendom has never lost. But all the while as he goes from Africa northwards, steering for the Balearics and the harbours of Spain, he remembers that other iron boundary of the Sahara which shuts us in, and the barrier against which his journey struck and turned. The silence permits him to recall most vividly the last of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of the wild. [Sidenote: The End] There, where the fresh torrent that has nourished the grove is already sinking, stagnant and brackish, to its end, a little palm-tree lives all alone and cherishes its life. Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but the line of the sand. [Illustration] FINIS Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO., LIMITED Tavistock Street, London Transcriber’s Notes 1. Standardized hyphenated words when the same word appeared in the text as both hyphenated and non-hyphenated. 2. Silently corrected palpable typographical errors; retained non-standard spellings and dialect. 3. Italic text in the original is delimited by underscores. 4. Bold text in the original is delimited by equals signs.