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Updated: June 14, 2025
Behind them the grey line had crept higher and higher, deepening into a delicate rose-pink, with the fan-like rays of the invisible sun shooting and quivering across it. Then, suddenly, they felt its warm touch upon their backs, and there were hard black shadows upon the sand in front of them. The Dervishes loosened their cloaks and proceeded to talk cheerily among themselves.
In the dusk the green-gold palms turn their star-like faces and stretch their fan-like fingers, lifting themselves proudly, lest any lordly leaf should know the taint of earth. Out from the isle the serpent hill thrusts its great length around the bay, shouldering back the waters and the shadows.
Lastly, the troika must present a fan-like front; to produce which the driver tightens the outside reins till the heads of the outriggers stand out at an angle of forty or fifty degrees from that of the horse in the shafts.
He would look over the Aegean from the height he had ascended; he would follow with his eye the chain of islands, which, starting from the Sunian headland, seemed to offer the fabled divinities of Attica, when they would visit their Ionian cousins, a sort of viaduct thereto across the sea: but that fancy would not occur to him, nor any admiration of the dark violet billows with their white edges down below; nor of those graceful, fan-like jets of silver upon the rocks, which slowly rise aloft like water spirits from the deep, then shiver, and break, and spread, and shroud themselves, and disappear, in a soft mist of foam; nor of the gentle, incessant heaving and panting of the whole liquid plain; nor of the long waves, keeping steady time, like a line of soldiery, as they resound upon the hollow shore, he would not deign to notice that restless living element at all, except to bless his stars that he was not upon it.
Over the windows and door-ways and chimney-pieces, are sculptures and mouldings of exquisite workmanship; and the eyeis bewildered by the profusion of caryatides, and arabesques, and rosettes, and fan-like flutings, and garlands of fruits and flowers and acorns, and bullocks'-heads with draperies of foliage, and muzzles of lions, holding rings in their teeth.
That arm thrust up horribly from the water: the body to which it belonged was beneath the surface. Between his dirty teeth the man held a knife. His business was obvious. He was spoiling the dead. A huge fellow with a tawny beard spread fan-like on his chest strolled round the Head, a musket beneath his arm. "What, Dingy! got the jumps aboard again?" he growled.
Mingled with the lighter bits of driftwood and heaps of seaweed are the shells of hundreds of crayfish some of the largest are newly cast up by the sea, and the carapace is yellow and blue; others are burnt red by exposure to the sun; while almost at every step you crush into the thin backs and armoured tails of young ones about a foot in length, the flesh of which, by some mysterious process of nature, has vanished, leaving the skin, muscles, and beautiful fan-like tail just as fresh as if the crustaceans were alive.
The top of the flood now poured into the mouth of the newly dug trench, biting huge mouthfuls of earth from its sides in its rush; spreading the reddish water fan-like over the down-stream slope: first into gullies; then a broad sluiceway that sunk out of sight in the soft earth; then crumblings, slidings of tons of sand and gravel, with here and there a bowlder washed clean; the men working like beavers, here to free a rock, there to drive home a plank, the trench all the while deepening, widening now a gulch ten feet across and as deep, now a canon through which surged a solid mass of frenzied water.
For how pretty it looked, though dead, lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting action of the bird had continued after death.
"Look out!" cried Rooney in alarm, for, being close to Arbalik in a kayak, he saw that the whale was coming straight at them. It ran on a shoal when close to them, doubled round in terror and whirled its great tail aloft. Right over Arbalik's head the fan-like mass quivered for one moment. The youth did not give it a chance.
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