On the sidewalks fewer people moved along. They no longer strode boldly, heads up and confident faces, as they had a few days before, when the Pacific High ruled the air and the northwest wind swirled through the sunlit city. Now in an environment suddenly grown half-aquatic, they scurried along, uncomfortable, in costumes only partly adapted to the rain. Men’s hats, dripping water, lost symmetry and spruceness; below overcoats, trouser legs collapsed damply; shoes lost all trace of shine, or disappeared beneath clumsy rubbers. Pink, green, and blue, women’s raincoats put up a brave front, but the color was infirm and chalky with no touch of gayety. And below the raincoats, shoes and clammy silk stockings were spattered and muddy. The very faces of men and women were hidden beneath umbrellas; as people passed at the corners, the umbrellas clicked and tangled.

And all the while, sprung of the forces of sun and earth, part of a vast system which covered the hemisphere, the south wind blew steadily. High above the wet sidewalks and the streaming gutters and the scurrying people, the hard-blown scud swirled about the towers and bare flag-poles; still higher was only the thick cloud-deck, and clean rain falling.

EIGHTH DAY

1

The place of man’s birth is unknown; but in poetic dreams (as if dimly remembering) man yearns back toward some land benign and equable, far from the path of storms. Such was the Earthly Paradise. Such was Lotus-Land, and that far country of Those-beyond-the-North-Wind. Such was the Isle of Apples, Avalon:

Where falls not hail or rain or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.

Still, near the Tropics, such regions may be found; in milder epochs they spread far toward the Poles.

Even yet, man seems to carry with him mementoes of some idyllic past. In his mind a grasshopper, each summer he assumes that the ever-blooming tropics still surround him. Only by hard-won wisdom, not by racial aptitude, does he lay up for the future. The birds fly south without waiting for frost; the bear stores up fat to hibernate; the bee and the beaver hoard food. If such creatures had grave and reverend philosophers, they might teach more concern with the present, and less with the future. But the average man always has difficulty in getting round to mend the roof in dry weather.

From the tropics also may stem man’s dislike of the violent changes of the temperate zones. For (as the saying goes) the tropics have climate but no weather; they display a set diurnal or seasonal rhythm. In his deepest instincts man seems to expect such sameness, to resent sudden shifts. He has never learned that in mid-latitudes unusual weather is all he can expect. He always grumbles.