And ’twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land, Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand, And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow And the white, changeless silences of snow; While here and there towns, like a living eye Unclosed on earth’s blind face, towards the sky Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight Of his fair earth gave him but small delight Now in his restlessness: its beauty could Do nought to quench the fever in his blood. Desire lends sharpness to his searching eyes; Over the world his focused passion flies Quicker than chasing sunlight on a day Of storm and golden April. Far away He sees the tranquil rivers of the East, Mirrors of many a strange barbaric feast, Where un-Hellenic dancing-girls contort Their yellow limbs, and gibbering masks make sport Under the moons of many-coloured light That swing their lantern-fruitage in the night Of overarching trees. To him it seems An alien world, peopled by insane dreams. But these are nothing to the monstrous shapes— Not men so much as bastardy of apes— That meet his eyes in Africa. Between Leaves of grey fungoid pulp and poisonous green, White eyes from black and browless faces stare. Dryads with star-flowers in their woolly hair Dance to the flaccid clapping of their own Black dangling dugs through forests overgrown, Platted with writhing creepers. Horrified, He sees them how they leap and dance, or glide, Glimpse after black glimpse of a satin skin, Among unthinkable flowers, to pause and grin Out through a trellis of suppurating lips, Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh . . . He turns Northward his sickened sight. The desert burns All life away. Here in the forkéd shade Of twin-humped towering dromedaries laid, A few gaunt folk are sleeping: fierce they seem Even in sleep, and restless as they dream. He would be fearful of a desert bride As of a brown asp at his sleeping side, Fearful of her white teeth and cunning arts. Further, yet further, to the ultimate parts Of the wide earth he looks, where Britons go Painted among their swamps, and through the snow Huge hairy snuffling beasts pursue their prey— Fierce men, as hairy and as huge as they.