Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/123

 night, and one morning found the Delphian steaming toward the Windward Passage, with strange lands risen suddenly to meet the swift tropic dawn. The sea was not blue now, but deep purple; sometimes a shark's pointed fin flashed and hovered alongside. Unknown islands raised blue spire-like shapes on the horizon, appeared like mirage, to disappear; faintly gold, nebulously blue, ethereal, fantastic mountains poised on the sea-line, shimmering into a hot blur over the wake. Then there was nothing but the violet sea and the strumming of the warm wind about the Delphian's rigging as she swung into the Passage, left a gleam of Cape Maisi astern, and steamed into the Jamaica Channel. The dark pulsing reaches of the Caribbean stretched before her. By day the paint cracked on her decks under an empty sky of lilac heat. By night she tossed a welter of unearthly phosphorescence behind her, and her bows writhed with green fire. Above, the Cross swung low, and Dorado smoldered splendidly.

At Colon there was mail, and time to answer it. Long and impassioned scrawls came from