Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/828

808 it still holds its place as the most brilliant and characteristic feature of this highly colored landscape, and it is totally unlike anything which is to be seen anywhere except in a coral sea.

The water is so perfectly pure and clear that small objects, like shells and star-fish, are visible on the pure white coral sand at a depth of fifty or sixty feet, and the sunlight, which is reflected from the white bottom, gives to the water a vivid green luster, which is totally unlike anything in our familiar conception of water. The whole surface of the sound seemed to be illuminated by an intense green, phosphorescent light, and it looked more like the surface of a gigantic polished crystal of beryl than water. The sky was perfectly clear and cloudless, and overhead it was of a deep blue color; but near the horizon the blue was so completely eclipsed by the vivid green of the water that the complementary color was brought out, and the blue was changed to a lurid pink as intense as that of a November sunset. The white foam which drifted by the vessel on the green water appeared as red as carmine, and I afterward found in a voyage through the sounds in a white schooner that the sides of the vessel seemed to have a thin coat of rose-colored paint when seen over the rail against the brilliant green.

About noon we reached our destination, Green Turtle, a small town on a key of the same name, nearly a hundred and fifty miles from Nassau, the center of the civilization of the islands. As there is no town between Green Turtle and Nassau, and as the only regular connection in the summer-time between Nassau and the rest of the world is a steamer once a month to New York, and as no message from home could reach us in time for a reply by the same steamer, we were more remote from our friends and families than we should have been in the Sandwich Islands. Although one member of our party had been a traveler in Asia and South America, and all but two had lived in Europe, I think that, as we came to anchor in the little harbor at Green Turtle and looked back upon our long journey, our scanty fare and narrow quarters, and thought of the miles of water which lay between us and home, we all felt that we had never before been so far away. As the strict laws of the island do not permit the transaction of any business on Sunday, we were not allowed to disembark until the next day, and we had plenty of time to examine from the water the new land which we had been so long in reaching.

We came to anchor in the mouth of a beautiful winding bay, in water about thirty feet deep, but so clear that the vessel seemed to float in air, and the motions of the gigantic star-fishes and sea-urchins could be studied on the white bottom as well as if they were in an aquarium. The shores of the bay are high and rocky and well wooded down to the water's edge, where the vegetation ends in a fringe of mangrove-bushes perched above the pure salt water on their long, stilt-like roots, which arch up from the bottom like the ribs of a great