Explore "Tide Marks" by H.M. Tomlinson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That romantic seaport town of the Orient made him uneasy. He wanted to get away from it. Yet how it had attracted him once-but that was when it was only a fine name on the map of the coast where the Indian Ocean meets the China Sea. Its upheaval of life startled him with a hint that it was without mind and did not know its power and what it was doing. This life seemed to have no intelligence; it was driven by blind impulse, even to its own destruction. Humanity would go on, without knowing why, and without getting anywhere, till its momentum failed.
He would have to get away from the place. If Christ himself were there he would have to pull a jinrickshaw till he dropped, or sweat from sunrise to dark in an evil barge, even if he were lucky enough to escape one of those many diseases with a course as certain, in that climate, as a spark in tinder. He would have no name, though he had God's last word to men. He would be only a bubble on that broad tide, and when he went out, who would notice it on such a flood?