Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/830

810 can see the vivid green gradually fading as the water deepens toward the edge of the reef, which is marked by a line of white breakers, heaving and tossing as the swell rolls in from the deep blue water, which stretches beyond until it merges with the lighter blue of the cloudless sky.

Every outline is so sharply defined in the pure atmosphere, and so many elements are crowded into the brilliantly colored picture, that it is more like a landscape traced by fancy in the clouds at sunset than a substantial reality, and the whole is so much like fairy-land that we feel that if we should shut our eyes for a few minutes we should expect on opening them to find the picture dissolving into clouds.

Curbing our fancy, however, and returning to the solid facts about us, science tells us that the history of the country is far stranger than any fairy-story, and that, as the geologist measures time, this whole group of islands, stretching for six hundred miles across the map, and furnishing a home where thousands of people are born and pass their lives, and grow old and die, is actually as transient and unstable as a summer cloud. Only a few years ago, as years go with the geologist, every particle of the land before us was diffused through the ocean in invisible calcareous molecules, which have been gathered from the waves and deposited by microscopic animals, and everywhere about us we find abundant proofs that if these animals should cease their constructive labors the whole would soon be diffused through the ocean like the lump of sugar which is dissolved by our coffee.

After we had familiarized ourselves with this distant view, the custom-house officer came aboard and welcomed us to the islands in the name of the British Government, and told us that, although we could not be permitted to settle on shore until the next day, we were at liberty to land and explore.

All the members of our party will long remember the kind face of this gentleman, Mr. Bethel, with whom we soon became well acquainted. He is not only the custom-house collector, but also resident magistrate, postmaster, health-officer, superintendent of schools, and the general representative of the Government. I myself, as director of the party, was the only witness of the promptness and informality with which he dispatched our business at his office, but we all were made to feel that he is a warm and kindly friend, ready to be called upon at all times for help and advice, and pleased to welcome us at his home.

As soon as we received his permission to land, a party started off in the yawl, which we had brought from Baltimore on the deck of our little schooner, to visit an abandoned house which was pointed out to us upon a hill-side at a distance from the town.

The boat soon reached the mangroves, and, pushing in as far as possible, we found ourselves surrounded by the life of the tropics. As the tide was out, we could reach up from the boat and gather over our