Everything Is Perfect On Board, Even To The
Cuisine, And I Appreciate The Low Rattan Chairs At The Bow, In Which
One Can Sit In The Shade And Enjoy The Zephyrs.
This day has been a tropic dream.
I have enjoyed it and am enjoying it
intensely. We steamed down the Klang river, and then down a narrow
river-like channel among small palm-fringed islands which suddenly
opened upon the sea, which was slightly green toward the coral-sanded,
densely wooded, unpeopled shores, but westward the green tint merged
into a blue tint, which ever deepened till a line of pure, deep,
indescribable blue cut the blue sky on the far-off clear horizon. But,
ah! that "many twinkling smile of ocean!" Words cannot convey an idea
of what it is under this tropic sun and sky, with the silver-flashing
wavelets rippling the surface of the sapphire sea, beneath whose clear
warm waters brilliant fishes are darting through the coral groves.
These are enchanted seas -
"Where falls not rain, or hail, or any snow,
Or ever wind blows loudly."
It is unseemly that the Abdulsamat should smoke and puff and leave a
foamy wake behind her. "Sails of silk and ropes of sendal," and poetic
noiseless movements only would suit these lovely Malacca Straits. This
is one of the very few days in my life in which I have felt mere living
to be a luxury, and what it is to be akin to seas and breezes, and
birds and insects, and to know why nature sings and smiles.
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