game, for often they were powerful creatures,
and were hurled against us with threatening impact.

But inspiring as was this sport at sunset or by moonlight, it was even
more exciting when we trod the reef with torches of dried reeds or
leaves or candlenuts threaded upon the spines of cocoanut-leaves,
and lanced the fish that were drawn by the lure of the lights,
or which we saw by their glare passing over the reef. The gleam of
the torches, the blackness all about, the masterful figures of the
Tahitians, the cries of warning, the laughter, the shouts of triumph,
and the melancholy himenes, the softness and warmth of the water,
the uncanny feel of living things about one's feet and body, the
imaginative shudder of fear at shark or octopus or other terrible
brute of the sea, the singing journey home in the canoes, and the
joyous landing and counting of the catch--all these were things
never to be forgotten, pictures to be unveiled in drabber scenes or
on white nights of sleeplessness.

The sponges were oddities hard to recognize as the tender toilet
article. Some were soft and some were full of grit. The grit was
their skeletons, for every sponge has a skeleton except three or four
very low specimens, and some without personal skeletons import them
by attraction and make up a frame from foreign bodies. I examined
and admired them, reasoning that I myself, in the debut of living
creatures, was close in appearance to one; but my basic interest in
them was to sit on them.

Many times I went only to where the coral began, half-way to the
reef. This was away from the path of the Vairahaha River, and where
the coral souls had manifestly indulged a thousand fancies in contour
and color. After the million years of their labor in throwing up the
bastion of the reef, with all its architectural niceties, they had
found in the repose behind it opportunities for the indulgence of
their artistry. They were the sculptors, painters, and gardeners of
the lagoon.

I brought with me a lunette, the diver's aid, a four-sided wooden
frame fifteen inches each way, with a bottom of glass and no top. I
stuck my head in the box and looked through the glass, which I
thrust below the surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion
caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily,
for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of
the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting
canoe.