ACROSS THE
ANDES

“The legion that never was listed,”

The soft-lilting rhythm and song,

The starlight, and shadowy tropics,

The palms—and all that belong;

The unknown that ever persisted

In dreams that were epics of bliss,

Of glory and gain without effort—

And the visions have faded, like this.

From dusk to dawn, when the heat is gone,

The home thoughts nestle and throb,

And the drifting breeze through the dim, gray trees

Stirs up the fancies wan

Of the old, cool life and a white man’s wife

With a white man’s babes on a lawn,

Where the soft greens please—yet each morrow sees

The flame that follows the dawn.

From dawn till eve the hot hours leave

Their mark like a slow-burned scar;

And a dull, red hate ’gainst the grilling fate,

Impulse and fevers weave;

While the days to come—in years their sum—

The helpless thoughts perceive

As an endless state, sans time or date,

That only gods relieve.

Rubber or gold—the game is old,

The lust and lure and venture;

And the trails gleam white in the tropic night

Where the restless spirits mould;

A vine-tied cross ’neath the festooned moss,

Bones in a matting rolled;

No wrong or right, the loss is slight,

The world-old fooled of gold.

“The legion that never was listed”—

The glamor of words in a song,

The lure of the strange and exotic,

The drift of the few from the throng;

The past that was never resisted

In the ebb or the flow of desire,

The foolish, the sordid, ambitious,

Now pay what the gods require.