Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/79

Rh and crimson hibiscus. The first named of these trees (Brassaia actinophylla) has large dark green shiny leaves and a slender trunk about forty feet high with spikes of scarlet flowers. Moreton Bay figs, large bloodwoods, pandanus palms, mangroves, yellow and red flowered hibiscus, cassuarini, malaleuca, nutmeg, the blue quandong (Elœocarpus grandis) the Cape gooseberry, and many other shrubs and trees grow in profusion matted together with ropelike creepers trying to strangle them; orchids, the beautiful climbing fern, the famous Enlada scandens vine, thick as a rope and bearing pods four feet long, containing perhaps a dozen large beans—all these and many more running riot. Scented isles indeed!

But wonderful are the coral gardens—coral of every shape and sort, great branches of it, big boulders of it, and the haunt of innumerable strange brilliantly coloured fish and other creatures. Sometimes when the tide goes out deep pools are left in these coral gardens, the water being clear as glass, revealing the most marvellously beautiful creatures of every sort. There are scores of fish of every shape, as brilliantly coloured as hummingbirds—so brilliant in colour as to be quite uncanny. The anemones and such denizens of the deep as inhabit these pools and adorn the rocks are of extraordinary beauty and colours, resembling gardens of flowers. The organ-piped coral, with expanded polyps, is astonishing in its variety and beauty, and one wonders if there really is a dividing line between such a thing and plant life. The giant sea-anemone is sometimes fifteen or eighteen feet in diameter, and it and other anemones are always accompanied by, and sometimes inhabited by, exquisitely beautiful little fish, so beautiful that one can only think with awe of the Great Designer and Creator of all this.