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The commander had engaged a pilot for the whole length of the Red Sea; for it is full of rocks and reefs, making the navigation difficult and dangerous, though it has been thoroughly surveyed, and the chart is speckled with small islands and coral reefs.
The inner walls of buildings are sometimes covered with thin slabs of marble. These are often carefully split, and the two pieces put up side by side, so that the pattern on one is reversed on the other. Certain kinds of marble contain fossils or remains of coral and other animals that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Leaving the shore, which, besides being unsheltered from the sun, was so rugged with crevices and gullies, and great irregular blocks of coral, as to be almost impassable, we entered the borders of the wood, and took a short cut across the point.
The islands are generally level, and thickly wooded, the forests containing amongst other birds two or three of the most beautiful species of birds of paradise. The "Iris" was almost ready to sail, so that we remained there but a couple of days, when, threading our way among the coral reefs, we once more got into the open sea.
A gust of wind blowing from the bay made to waver the lanterns of the Golden Rose, broke and darkened the coral peace of the river, and pushed rudely against the master of those parts. Haward laid his hand upon his horse that he loved. "This is better than the Ring, isn't it, Mirza?" he asked genially, and the horse whinnied under his touch.
My state apartments were built of coral, in wondrous architecture, and trumpet-weed clothed their battlements. Some cavernous recesses were lit with constellations of shining zoophytes, and there were floors of pearl, studded with diamonds.
From these tiny frames there comes a hard, stony substance that spreads and spreads as we have seen, while the part that was alive becomes a mere dead shell. This is the best explanation I can give about coral and the tiny creatures from which it takes its start, and that seem so exceedingly small to me to be called "sea-animals."
This is the chosen nook of the rare gilia, which hides itself under the edge of a bush, or close against a low tree, bearing its pink and coral treasures modestly out of sight, until a flower-seeking eye spies it, glowing like a gem in the green world about it.
The women are dressed in long flannel petticoats and spencer, over which is thrown a sleeveless, short, striped cloak, drawn round the waist by a girdle of broad brass or silver links, to which hang their knives, scissors, needlecases, etc., and with which they often strap their children to their backs; the hair is plaited in two tails, and the neck loaded with strings of coral and glass beads, and great lumps of amber, glass, and agate.
But a beach of sand and of fragments of the smaller kinds of coral seems, in the case of Mauritius, to be slowly encroaching on the shallow channel. Similar bars, more or less perfect, occur on other coasts. Mag."
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