Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/101

89 The aquarium, fathoms deep yet crystal-clear, was a vast depository of them, the beauty, the humour, the fancies, the wondrous figments of the imagination of the Almighty. One had but to look down into the waters to realize an infinite variety which far outranged the vengefulness or mercy, the two lone attributes with which past ages have credited Him.

The island itself he christened "The Island of Green Stairways," a happy title, suggested by the view from the bay, looking upward and to the South. From the pink and white shore, it rose in a beautiful succession of table-lands covered with rich foliage of varying shades, that looked for all the world like green terraces or stairways designed for some giant's ascent to "Cone Mountain," a height of some two thousand feet, sometimes blue as smoke from a woodfire in the forest, at others tinted the darker hue of a swallow's wings. Yet even here, on the unencumbered shore, outside of the bewildering green wildwood inland, as his eye followed palm coronal, and plumed terrace after plumed terrace, to the mountain, the same sense of unreality held. The perspectives were bewildering, like those in the vistas of Versailles, now limned as on a vertical canvas suspended near one's eyes, again as though lengthened by a camera lens to poetic distances.

However, in infinite attention to practical detail lay salvation, and he returned to the shoreline again, curving around it until he reached the more jagged volcanic shore to the East, indented by little unnavigable bays, and one of deeper water, though not so favourable as that between the Twin