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One day, about a week after they had bidden farewell to the Bay of Biscay with all its terrors and troubled waters, as the ship was approaching that region of calms which lies adjacent to the Tropic of Cancer, her rate of progression had grown so "small by degrees and beautifully less," that she barely drifted southward with the current, until at length she came to a dead stop, so far as those on board could judge, lying motionless on the surface of the water "like a painted ship upon a painted ocean," as the situation is described in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
It did us good service later, though not by defying the winds of heaven, nor spreading forth its snowy sails to catch the tropic breezes.
The rich voice rose to all the meaning of the music, and, though they could not understand the words, they thrilled before the singer, Late into the midnight she sang the bunch of blossoms that was in her hand as she came on board still shedding its pungent odors round her as the blossoms died strange wild songs that she had learned in the two years of her tropic life; ancient and plaintive Spanish airs; Moorish songs whose savage tunes were sweet as the honey of the rocks; wild and mournful Indian airs that the Spaniards might have heard in those Caribbean islands when first they burst upon their peaceful seas; and by and by a sleepy nocturne that seemed to lull the wind, to charm the ship, and hold the great moon hovering overhead; and as they rocked from wave to wave of the glimmering water, and that pure voice rose and poured out its melody, the soft vast southern night itself seemed to pause and listen.
Once, as if in explanation for words unspoken, he commented nervously on the sensation of unreality with which these tropic scenes inspired him, and Rachael, who longed to withdraw her hand from his arm, told him of an entertainment peculiar to the Islands, a torchlight hunt for land-crabs, which once a year travel down from the mountains to the sea, to bathe and shed their shells.
Familiar as these islands have become to many of us, to him they were all new, beautiful, and strange, a string of tropic pearls or rare emeralds spread out along those shining waters of the South. On leaving San Salvador, the Spaniards, their hearts elate with joy and pride in their discovery, hardly knew whither to go. They seemed drawn to the right and the left alike.
The explosion of that shot crackled in from another line of dunes, off to eastward a brown, burnt ridge, parched by the tropic sun of ages. Sweating with the heat and the exertion of the charge, amazed at having found in place of windrows of sleeping men an enemy still distant and still as formidable as ever, the Legionaries for a moment remained without thought or tactics.
And to the Arangi, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the whaleboat under the arm of his Mister Haggin, while on the beach Biddy moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the eternal challenge of youth to the Unknown.
And I have died a hundred deaths on the great South Sea drift ere ever the rebirth of me came to plant monuments, that only Aryans plant, on volcanic tropic islands that I, Darrell Standing, cannot name, being too little versed to-day in that far sea geography.
His thoughts, released from the pressure of financial altercations, were a trifle tumultuous and wandering. They went bounding back now, at the mere mental suggestion of Cuba, to that tropic island, the scene of his stirring military experiences. Event followed event on the lightened screen of reminiscence.
The ship came to anchor abreast of a point upon which he descried a squat little spider-legged lighthouse and long rows of frame dwellings half hidden behind slender palm-trees. Beyond were warehouses and docks and the funnels of many ships; on either side of the bay was a dense tropic wilderness.
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