he miracle of sunrise occurred every
morning, and was not a rather belated alternation of illumination,
following the quenching of Broadway's lights. And the moon I found was
as dependable as when I timed my Himalayan expeditions by her
shadowings. To these phenomena I soon became re-accustomed, and could
watch a bird or outwit an insect in the face of a foreglow and silent
burst of flame that shamed all the barrages ever laid down. But cosmic
happenings kept drawing my attention and paralyzing my activities for
long afterward. With a double rainbow and four storms in action at
once; or a wall of rain like sawn steel slowly drawing up one river
while the Mazaruni remains in full sunlight; with Pegasus galloping
toward the zenith at midnight and the Pleiades just clearing the Penal
Settlement, I could not always keep on dissecting, or recording, or
verifying the erroneousness of one of my recently formed theories.

There was Thuban, gazing steadily upon my little mahogany bungalow,
as, six millenniums ago, he had shone unfalteringly down the little
stone tube that led his rays into the Queen's Chamber, in the very
heart of great Cheops. Just clearing a low palm was the present North
Star, while, high above, Vega shone, patiently waiting to take her
place half a million years hence. When beginning her nightly climb,
Vega drew a thin, trembling thread of argent over the still water,
just as in other years she had laid for me a slender silver strand of
wire across frozen snow, and on one memorable night traced the ghost
of a reflection over damp sand near the Nile--pale as the wraiths of
the early Pharaohs.

Low on the eastern horizon, straight outward from my beach, was the
beginning and end of the great zodiac band--the golden Hamal of Aries
and the paired stars of Pisces; and behind, over the black jungle,
glowed the Southern Cross. But night after night, as I watched on the
beach, the sight which moved me most was the dull speck of emerald
mist, a merest smudge on the slate of the heavens,--the spiral nebula
in Andromeda,--a universe in the making, of a size unthinkable to
human minds.

The power of my jungle beach to attract and hold attention was not
only direct and sensory,--through sight and sound and scent,--but
often indirect, seemingly by occult means. Time after time, on an
impulse, I followed some casual line of thought and action, and found
myself at last on or near the beach, on a lead that eventually woul