soft Pacific sea, here sheer
and challenging, there sloping gently from mountain height to ocean
sheen; different all about, altering with hiding sun or shifting view
its magic mold, with moods as varied as the wind, but ever lovely,
alluring, new.

I marked the volcanic make of it, cast up from the low bed of Neptune
an eon ago, its loftiest peaks peering from the long cloud-streamers
a mile and a half above my eyes, and its valleys embracing caverns
of shadow. It was a stupendous precipice suspended from the vault of
heaven, and in its massive folds secreted the wonders I had come so
far to see. Every minute the bewildering contours were transmuted by
the play of sun and cloud and our swift progression toward the land.

Red spots appeared rare against the field of verdure where the
mountain-side had been stripped naked by erosion, and the volcanic
cinnabar of ages contrasted oddly with the many greens of frond and
palm and hillside grove. Curious, fantastic, the hanging peaks and
cloud-capped scarps, black against the fleecy drift, were tauntingly
reminiscent of the evening skies of the last few days, as if the
divine artist had sketched lightly upon the azure of the heavens the
entrancing picture to be drawn firmly and grandly in beetling crag
and sublime steep.

Most of all, as the island swam closer, the embracing fringe of
cocoanut-trees drew my eyes. They were like a girdle upon the beautiful
body of the land, whose lower half was in the ocean. They seemed the
freewaving banners of romance, whispering always of nude peoples, of
savage whites, of ruthless passion, of rum and missionaries, cannibals
and heathen altars, of the fierce struggle of the artificial and the
primitive. I loved these palms, brothers of my soul, and for me they
have never lost their romantic significance.

From the sea, the village of Papeete, the capital and port, was all but
hidden in the wood of many kinds of trees that lies between the beach
and the hills. Red and gray roofs appeared among the mass of growing
things at almost the same height, for the capital rested on only a
narrow shelf of rising land, and the mountains descended from the sky
to the very water's-edge. Greener than the Barbadoes, like malachite
upon the dazzling Spanish Main, Tahiti gleamed as a promise of Elysium.

A lighthouse, tall minister of warning, lifted upon a headland, and
suddenly there was disclosed intimately the brilliant, shimmering surf
breaking on