Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/100

90 glow with the sparkling colors of jewels. The hot air is loaded with moisture to the saturation-point, like that of the deep, shady recesses of a rocky glen on the edge of a waterfall; but the islands are also as wind-swept as a mountain-top, and the air is absolutely pure, for the ocean breeze brings with it no smoke nor dust, no pollen nor vegetable refuse, nor anything whatever except pure, moist, warm air. As the saturated sea-breeze blows over the thousand islands of the archipelago, the slight difference between the temperature of the changeless ocean and that of the variable land, which heats quickly in the daytime and cools quickly at night, manifests itself by the formation of great, snow-white banks of summer clouds which are as characteristic of the Bahama horizon as the water itself or the deep, pure blue of the sky between the clouds.

The islands stand on the extreme edge of a submerged abyss where the surface falls as suddenly and to as great a depth as it does from the summit of the Andes, and the unfathomable water of mid-ocean is only a few miles away. Some of the out islands are only two miles or so from water more than two miles deep, and the currents which sweep through the sounds and around the islands at each turn of the tide are absolutely pure, and they have the intense color which is found in mid-ocean, or the melted ice of glacial lakes, or in the center of the rocky basin of Lake Superior. In great depths this color is a pure, vivid sapphire blue, darker but more transparent than the blue of the sky. In the shallow sounds, where the intense sunlight is reflected back from the chalky bottom, it glows like a surface of beryl with an intense green lustre totally unlike anything which is met with in other waters, although the center of the Horseshoe at Niagara would be very similar if it plunged over a ledge of white marble under the light of a tropical sun. All these influences combine to give a degree of intensity and vividness which can not exist in a continent to all the colors of a landscape which is wrapped in perpetual spring. Under their dome of blue sky and snowy clouds the Isles of June, in their setting of sapphire, are buried under a mantle of verdure so dense and luxuriant that the vegetation thrives as if in a hot-house, and, abandoning the rocky and sterile ground and contenting themselves with the warm, moist sea-breeze, not only the mosses and ferns and orchids and bromeliads, but large trees as well, grow tier above tier, climbing over each other's heads in their efforts to escape the struggle for existence and to obtain air and sunlight and standing-room.

Who can wonder that, when Columbus found himself in this enchanted fairy-land after the changeless monotony of mid-ocean and all the anxieties of his long voyage into unknown waters, he