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So little by little we got our existence upon a working basis. We lived a peaceful, routine life, to the music of cocoanut-palms rustling in the warm breezes which blew incessantly off the Mexican Gulf.
At last the man said, "Sure enough, you will eat me up, Lion; but let us just go to the Cat." When they reached the Cat's home, they found her sitting at the door, keeping her nice house. It had groves of cocoanut-palms around it. The Cat lived all alone. The man said to her, "This Lion wants to eat me." "Yes, Lion," the Cat replied; "but first you make a deep hole in the ground.
The highest ground was not more than twelve feet above the level of the sea, and we calculated that it was about six hundred feet wide to its lagoon. The shrubs were not numerous, seldom more than twelve to fifteen feet high. Amid them rose conspicuously cocoanut-palms, and pandanus.
"You remember the old woman on the road from Killarney to the lakes who told us she lived in the Irish castle, to which she pointed; and it looked like a pig-sty." "Of course it didn't have the bananas and the cocoanut-palms around it." "I admit that we saw many fine places in Ireland, and very likely your mother lived in one of them.
The mountain-top on which the seaman sat was probably eight or nine hundred feet above the level of the sea, and commanded a view of the whole island. On one side lay three lesser hills, covered to their summits with indescribably rich verdure, amongst which rose conspicuous the tall stems and graceful foliage of many cocoanut-palms.
Across the bottom of the ravine, between the two bluffs, extended a thickly planted strip of cocoanut-palms, whose gray trunks and drooping, feathery foliage served as a background for half a dozen leaf-thatched Cuban huts, an iron railway-bridge painted red, and a great encampment of white shelter-tents through which roamed thousands of blue-shirted soldiers, Cuban insurgents from the army of Garcia, and dirty, tattered refugees from all parts of the country, attracted to the beach by the landing of the army and the prospect of getting food.
How compare such names with John Smith or Henry Wilson? Yet we ourselves, did we remember it, have come from ancestors bearing names as resonant. Nero was Ahenobarbus, the Red-Bearded, to his contemporaries of Rome, at the time when Titihuti's forefathers were brave and great beneath the cocoanut-palms of Atuona.
Two sheep were huddled together by my trail window, the horses were lying down in the brush, and a nightingale lilted a gay love song in the cocoanut-palms above the House of the Golden Bed. Next morning all Atuona had a tight handkerchief bound over its forehead. I met twenty men and women with this sign of repentance upon their brows.
Towering precipices, seamed and riven, rose above the vast welter of the gray sea. Slowly we crept into the wide Bay of Traitors and felt our way into the anchorage of Taha-Uka, a long and narrow passage between frowning cliffs, spray-dashed walls of granite lashed fiercely by the sea. All along the bluffs were cocoanut-palms, magnificent, waving their green fronds in the breeze.
The vivid but pale and delicate green of the ocean water; the slender, fern-headed cocoanut-palms which stand in clumps here and there along the streets; the feathery Australian pines and dark-green Indian laurels which shade the naval storehouse and the Marine Hospital; the masses of tamarind, almond, sapodilla, wild-fig, banana, and cork-tree foliage in the yards of the white, veranda-belted houses; the Spanish and Cuban types on the piers and in front of the hotels; the unfamiliar language which strikes the ear at almost every step all suggest a tropical environment and Spanish, rather than American, influences and characteristics.
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