the water. In the
darkness of the cabin it gave no light until I passed my hand
through it. That was like opening a door into a room flooded by
electricity; the table, the edges of the bunks, the uninterested
faces of my shipmates, leaped from the shadows. Marvels do not seem
marvelous to men to live among them.

I lay long awake on deck, watching the eerily lighted sea and the
great stars that hung low in the sky, and to my fancy it seemed that
the air had changed, that some breath from the isles before us had
softened the salty tang of the sea-breeze.

Land loomed at daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable. Rain fell
drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands
sighted from the south. We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees
south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and
we had made a westward of ten degrees. The Marquesas Islands lay
before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the gray water.

They are not large, any of these islands; sixty or seventy miles is
the greatest circumference. Some of the eleven are quite small, and
have no people now. On the map of the world they are the tiniest
pin-pricks. Few dwellers in Europe or America know anything about
them. Most travelers have never heard of them. No liners touch them;
no wire or wireless connects them with the world. No tourists visit
them. Their people perish. Their trade languishes. In Tahiti, whence
they draw almost all their sustenance, where their laws are made,
and to which they look at the capital of the world, only a few men,
who traded here, could tell me anything about the Marquesas. These
men had only the vague, exaggerated ideas of the sailor, who goes
ashore once or twice a year and knows nothing of the native life.

Seven hundred and fifty miles as the frigate flies separates these
islands from Tahiti, but no distance can measure the difference
between the happiness of Tahiti, the sparkling, brilliant loveliness
of that flower-decked island, and the stern, forbidding aspect of the
Marquesas lifting from the sea as we neared them. Gone were the
laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of
nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining shore. The
spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate
islands for his own.

While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky
headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity,