head up the lagoon to the left. He kept
close to the shore, but for the life of him he could not help lifting
his eyes and looking towards the reef.
Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great
commotion of birds. Huge birds some of them seemed, and the "Hi! hi!
hi!" of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarrelled
together and beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away
till a bend of the shore hid the spot from sight.
Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef,
the artu came in places right down to the water's edge; the breadfruit
trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water;
glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes
of the scarlet "wild cocoanut" all slipped by, as the dinghy, hugging
the shore, crept up the lagoon.
Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake,
but for the thunder of the Pacific upon the distant reef; and even that
did not destroy the impression, but only lent a strangeness to it.
A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was.
Here and there cocoa-nut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their
delicate stems, and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom
a fathom deep below.
He kept close in-shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His
object was to find some place where they might stop permanently, and
put up a tent. He was seeking a new home, in fact. But, pretty as were
the glades they passed, they were not attractive places to live in.
There were too many trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was seeking
air and space, and suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all
blazing with the scarlet of the wild cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a
new world.
Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-swept water, down
to which came a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side
with deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land, where, above
the massive and motionless green of the great breadfruit trees, the
palm trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the
breeze. The pale colour of the water was due to the extreme shallowness
of the lagoon just here. So shallow was it that one could see brown
spaces indicating beds of dead and rotten coral, and splashes of
darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The reef lay more than half
a mile from the shore: a gre
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