It Was Fairly Difficult To Catch The Land
Playing These Tricks.
As long as I kept my mind on it, nothing
happened.
But as soon as my attention was distracted, away it went,
the whole panorama, swinging and heaving and tilting at all sorts of
angles. Once, however, I turned my head suddenly and caught that
stately line of royal palms swinging in a great arc across the sky.
But it stopped, just as soon as I caught it, and became a placid
dream again.
Next we came to a house of coolness, with great sweeping veranda,
where lotus-eaters might dwell. Windows and doors were wide open to
the breeze, and the songs and fragrances blew lazily in and out.
The walls were hung with tapa-cloths. Couches with grass-woven
covers invited everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played,
I was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies. Servants -
Japanese maids in native costume - drifted around and about,
noiselessly, like butterflies. Everything was preternaturally cool.
Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea.
It was too good to be true. But it was not real. It was a dream-
dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano
cavorting in a spacious corner of the room. I did not say anything,
for just then we were being received by a gracious woman, a
beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod with sandals, who
greeted us as though she had known us always.
We sat at table on the lotus-eating veranda, served by the butterfly
maids, and ate strange foods and partook of a nectar called poi.
But the dream threatened to dissolve. It shimmered and trembled
like an iridescent bubble about to break. I was just glancing out
at the green grass and stately trees and blossoms of hibiscus, when
suddenly I felt the table move. The table, and the Madonna across
from me, and the veranda of the lotus-eaters, the scarlet hibiscus,
the greensward and the trees - all lifted and tilted before my eyes,
and heaved and sank down into the trough of a monstrous sea. I
gripped my chair convulsively and held on. I had a feeling that I
was holding on to the dream as well as the chair. I should not have
been surprised had the sea rushed in and drowned all that fairyland
and had I found myself at the wheel of the Snark just looking up
casually from the study of logarithms. But the dream persisted. I
looked covertly at the Madonna and her husband. They evidenced no
perturbation. The dishes had not moved upon the table. The
hibiscus and trees and grass were still there. Nothing had changed.
I partook of more nectar, and the dream was more real than ever.
"Will you have some iced tea?" asked the Madonna; and then her side
of the table sank down gently and I said yes to her at an angle of
forty-five degrees.
"Speaking of sharks," said her husband, "up at Niihau there was a
man - " And at that moment the table lifted and heaved, and I gazed
upward at him at an angle of forty-five degrees.
So the luncheon went on, and I was glad that I did not have to bear
the affliction of watching Charmian walk. Suddenly, however, a
mysterious word of fear broke from the lips of the lotus-eaters.
"Ah, ah," thought I, "now the dream goes glimmering." I clutched
the chair desperately, resolved to drag back to the reality of the
Snark some tangible vestige of this lotus land. I felt the whole
dream lurching and pulling to be gone. Just then the mysterious
word of fear was repeated. It sounded like REPORTERS. I looked and
saw three of them coming across the lawn. Oh, blessed reporters!
Then the dream was indisputably real after all. I glanced out
across the shining water and saw the Snark at anchor, and I
remembered that I had sailed in her from San Francisco to Hawaii,
and that this was Pearl Harbour, and that even then I was
acknowledging introductions and saying, in reply to the first
question, "Yes, we had delightful weather all the way down."
CHAPTER VI - A ROYAL SPORT
That is what it is, a royal sport for the natural kings of earth.
The grass grows right down to the water at Waikiki Beach, and within
fifty feet of the everlasting sea. The trees also grow down to the
salty edge of things, and one sits in their shade and looks seaward
at a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one's very feet.
Half a mile out, where is the reef, the white-headed combers thrust
suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise-blue and come rolling
in to shore. One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking
crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea. And
one sits and listens to the perpetual roar, and watches the unending
procession, and feels tiny and fragile before this tremendous force
expressing itself in fury and foam and sound. Indeed, one feels
microscopically small, and the thought that one may wrestle with
this sea raises in one's imagination a thrill of apprehension,
almost of fear. Why, they are a mile long, these bull-mouthed
monsters, and they weigh a thousand tons, and they charge in to
shore faster than a man can run. What chance? No chance at all, is
the verdict of the shrinking ego; and one sits, and looks, and
listens, and thinks the grass and the shade are a pretty good place
in which to be.
And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising
like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white,
on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious
crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the
rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his
limbs - all is abruptly projected on one's vision.
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