Wild Adventures round the Pole
Page 3
McBain.
"Oh!" replied Ralph, "his letter is beautiful. It is twelve pages long.He is loud in his praises of the behaviour of the yacht, as a matter ofcourse; but in no single sentence of this lengthy epistle does he referdefinitely to the health or welfare of anybody whatever."
"From which you infer--?"
"From which I infer," said Ralph, "that everybody is as well as Roryhimself--that my dear father is well, and Allan, and his mother, and hissister Helen Edith. He is a queer boy, Rory, and he encloses me acouple of columns from a Cape of Good Hope paper, in which he haswritten an epitome of the whole voyage, since they first started in Maylast. He calls his yarn `Right round Africa.' He commences at Suez, aplace where even boy Rory, I should think, would fail to find muchpoetry and romance; but they must have enjoyed themselves at Alexandria,where Rory mounted on top of Pompey's Pillar, rode upon donkeys, and didall kinds of queer things. Well, they spent a week at Malta, with itsstreets of stairs, its bells, its priests, its convents, and itsblood-oranges. Rory missed trees and shade, though; he says Malta is acapital place for lizards, or any animal, human or otherwise, that caresto spend the day basking on the top of a stone. He liked Tunis andAlgiers better, and he quite enjoyed Teneriffe and Madeira. Then theycrossed over to Sierra Leone, and he launches forth in praise of theawful forests--`primeval,' he calls them--and he says, in his owninimitable Irish way, that `they are dark, bedad, even in broaddaylight.' Then all down the strange savage West Coast they sailed;they even visited Ashantee, but he doesn't say whether or not theycalled on his sable majesty the king. Of course they didn't misslooking in at Saint Helena, which he designates a paradise in mid-ocean,and not a lonely sea-girt rock, as old books call it. Ascension wastheir next place of resort. That is a rock, if you like, he says; butthe sea-birds' eggs and the turtle are redeeming features. And so on tothe Cape, and up the Mozambique, landing here and there at beautifulvillages and towns, and in woods where they picked the oysters off thetrees."
[Oysters growing on trees seems a strange paradox. They do so grow,however. The mangrove-trees are washed by the tide, and to theirtortuous roots oysters adhere, which may be gathered at low water.]
"They really must be enjoying themselves," said McBain.
"That they are," Ralph replied, pulling out Rory's letter. "Just listenhow charmingly he writes of the Indian Ocean--nobody else save our ownpoetic Rory could so write:--`My dear, honest, unsophisticated Ralph,--oh, you ought to have been with us as we rounded the Cape! Thatthunderstorm by night would have made even your somewhat torpid bloodtingle in your veins. It was night, my Ralph; what little wind therewas was dead off the iron-bound coast, but the billows were mountainshigh. Yes, this is no figure of speech. I have never seen such wavesbefore, and mayhap never will again. I have never seen such lightning,and never heard such thunder. We remained all night on deck; no one hadthe slightest wish to go below. As I write our yacht is bounding over ablue and rippling sea; the low, wooded shore on our lee is sleeping inthe warm sunlight, and everything around us breathes peace and quiet,and yet I have but to clap my hand across my eyes, and once again thewhole scene rises up before me. I see the lightning quivering on thedark waves, and flashing incessantly around us, with intervals of theblackest darkness. I see the good yacht clinging by the bows to thecrest of the waves, or plunging arrowlike into the watery ravines; I seethe wet and slippery decks and cordage, and the awe-struck men aroundthe bulwarks; and I see the faces of my friends as I saw them then--Allan's knitted brow, his mother's looks of terror, and the palefeatures of poor Helen Edith. There are nights, Ralph, in the life of asailor that he is but little likely ever to forget; that was one in minethat will cling to my memory till I cease to breathe.'
"Don't you call that graphic?" said Ralph.
"I do," replied McBain; "give us one other extract, and then lend me theletter. I'll take it to town with me, and you can have it again whenyou come up."
"Well," said Ralph, "he describes Delagoa Bay and the scenery all roundit so pleasantly, that if I hadn't an estate of my own in old England Iwould run off and take a farm there; right quaintly he talks of thecurious Portuguese city of Mozambique; he is loud in the praises of theComoro Islands, especially of Johanna, with its groves of citrons andlimes, its feathery palm-trees, and its lofty mountains, tree-clad tothe very summits; and he could write a lordly volume, he says, on thesultanic city of Zanzibar, where, it would seem, his adventures were notlike angels' visits--few and far between. He has even fought with thewild Somali Indians, and assisted at a pitched battle between Arabs anda British cruiser. Then he describes his adventures in the woods and inthe far-off hills and jungles, tiger-slaying; here is a serpentadventure; here is a butterfly hunt. Fancy butterflies as big as alady's fan, and of plumage--yes, that is the very word Rory makes useof--`plumage' more bright than a noonday rainbow.
"Here again is a description of the great Johanna hornet, two incheslong, blue-black in colour, and so dreaded by the natives that they willnot approach within twenty yards of the tree these terrible insectsinhabit. Here is a beetle as big as a fish, and as strong apparently asa man, for he seizes hold of the top of the big pickle-jar into whichRory wants to introduce him, and obstinately refuses to be drowned inspirits; and here is a centipede as long as an adder, green,transparent, deadly; tarantulas as big as frogs, hairy and horrible;scorpions as big as crabs, green and dangerous as the centipedesthemselves, that run from you, it is true, but threaten you as they run.
"It is pleasant," continued Ralph, "to turn from his descriptions of theawful African creepie-creepies, and read of the enchanting beauty ofsome parts of the Zanzibar woods, the mighty trees mango-laden, thepatches of tempting pine-apples, through which one can hardly wade, thecurious breadfruit-trees, the pomolos, the citrons, the oranges, and theguavas, that look and taste, says Rory, `like strawberries smothered incream.' He dilates, too, on the beauty of the wild flowers, and thebrilliancy of the birds--birds that never sing, but flit sadly andsilently from bough to bough in the golden sunlight. From the verycentre of this beautiful wood Rory, with masterly pen, carries you rightaway to a lovely coral island in the Indian Ocean.
"`Although many, many miles in extent,' he tells us, `although it isclothed in waving woods, although even the cocoa-nut palm waves highaloft its luscious fruit, it is not inhabited by man. Perhaps my boatwas the first that ever rasped upon its shore of silvery sand, perhaps Iwas the first human being that ever lay under the shade of itsmangrove-trees or bathed in the waters of its sunny lagune. My boat isa skiff--a tiny skiff; our yacht lies at anchor off Chak-Chak, and Ihave come all alone to visit this fairy-like island. I left the shipwhile the stars were still glittering in the heavens, long before thesun leapt up and turned the waters into blood; and now I have rested,bathed, and breakfasted, and am once more on board my indolent skiff.Here in this bay, even half a mile from the shore, you can see thebottom distinct and clear, for the water is as pellucid as crystal, andthere isn't a ripple on the sea. And what do I gaze upon?--A submarinegarden; and I gaze upon it like one enchanted, the while my boat--impelled by the tide alone--glides slowly on and over it. Down yonderare flowers of every shape and hue, shrubs of every variety of foliage,coral bushes--pink, and white, and even black--rocks covered withmedusae of the most brilliant colours an artist could imagine, andpatches of white sand, strewn with living shells, each one more lovelyto look upon than another. And every bush and shrub and flower is alla-quiver with a strange, indescribable motion, which greatly heightenstheir magical beauty; and why? Because every bush and shrub and floweris composed of a thousand living things. But the larger creatures thatcreep and crawl, or glide through this submarine garden are fantastic inthe extreme. Monster crabs and crayfish, horny, abhorrent, and sostrange in shape one cannot help thinking they were made to frighteneach other; long transparent fishes, partly grayling partly eel; flatfishes that swim in all kinds of ridiculous ways; some fishes that seemall tail together, and others that are nothing bu
t head. And among allthe others a curious flat fish that swims on an even keel, and, by thevery brilliancy of his colours and gorgeous array, seems to quite takethe shine out of all the others. Both sides of this fish are paintedalike; both sides of him are divided into five or six equal parts, andeach part is of a different colour--one is a marigold yellow, anothergreen, another brightest crimson, another steel grey, and so on. Him Idubbed the harlequin flounder. Yes, Ralph, Shakespeare was right whenhe said there are more things in heaven and earth than we dream of inour philosophy, and he might have added there are more things in ocean'sdepths, and stranger things, than any naturalist ever could imagine.'
"You see," said Ralph, folding Rory's funny letter, and handing it