brick front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond
its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is
the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would
guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of
tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and
scored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothing
could live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it were
volcanic, from numberless vents. The region is without sap. Above its
expanse project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving
great areas. When the track descends slightly, you see cavities in
that cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actually
burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Something
does live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunneled
and inhabited. The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke
moving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen.
It is the beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings,
each with independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous
movement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea
of height, of rising, it is difficult to believe. It has not been
believed. If life, you protest, is really there, has any purpose which
is better than that of extending worm-like through the underground,
then why, at intervals, is there not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst,
a plain hint from a power usually pent, but liable to go skywards? But
that is for the desert to answer. As by mocking chance the desert
itself almost instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it.
The train roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow
filled with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships. How
did that white schooner get into such an enclosure? Is freedom nearer
here than we thought?