1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of the
central calm--people did not know the barometer was still going down
--then suddenly all perdition broke loose again while people were rushing
around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded. The noise was
comparable to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and
cannon, and these are feeble in comparison.

What there is of Mauritius is beautiful. You have undulating wide
expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye;
and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of
vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with
graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you
have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking
through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the
pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains,
some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little
vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of
sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.

That is Mauritius; and pretty enough. The details are few, the massed
result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a
Sunday landscape. Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance,
are wanting. There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to
speak. Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.
Mauritius is a garden and a park combined. It affects one's emotions as
parks and gardens affect them. The surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are
pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not
stirred. Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which
haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the
sky--these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see
visions and dream dreams.

The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter
of tropical islands. I would add another story to Mauna Loa's 16,000
feet if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and
forbidding and snowy; and I would make the volcano spout its lava-floods
out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these
non-essentials I have no corrections to suggest. I hope these will be
attended to; I do not wish to have to speak of it again.

CHAPTER LXIV.

When