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Big canoes, manned by dark-skinned men in white turbans and loin-cloths, floated round our ship, or lay poised on the clear depths of aquamarine water, with fairy freights forests of coral white as snow, or red, pink, violet, in massive branches or fern-like sprays, fresh from their warm homes beneath the clear warm waves, where fish as bright-tinted as themselves flash through them like "living light."
At night, when it is really quiet, you will hear the roar of the ocean ten miles away. Hark!" Our host was singing far down in the corn. He was a minister, a deep-toned Methodist, brimming over with vocal piety. "Nearer the great white throne, Nearer the jasper sea," came to us in slow, rich cadences. The fern-like branches above us stirred softly against the blue.
Still it stood, snarling and roaring with rage at being deprived of its prey. Gradually its cries of anger ceased, its glaring eyes grew dim, its legs seemed to refuse it support, and slowly it sank back among the mass of fern-like plants which bordered the bank.
The cut-leaved beech sometimes reverts partially only, and the branches often display the different forms of cut-leaved, fern-like, oak-leaved and other variously shaped leaves on the same twigs.
It stood as an outpost of the dense vegetation beyond. Totally unlike the forests of Earth were those fern-like trees, towering two hundred feet into the air. They were of an intensely vivid green and stood motionless in the still, hot air of noonday. Not a sign of animal life was to be seen; the whole landscape seemed asleep.
There the inhabitants dress only in the finest of silks; the roofs and walls are covered with layers of silk; the sun always shines, and pretty birds with silken plumage chatter in the fern-like trees. Splash! And the Master Mariner fell into the sea. Now the island of Silk Land was at this time ruled by the prettiest of princesses.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding rains, we saw scattered on the ground.
Of course there were orchards after orchards of orange trees covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light.
And when one of those feathery, fern-like fronds, toying with the breeze, comes crashing to the ground, it is ten or twelve feet long, and consists of a great backbone, as thick at the base as a man's leg, with a close-set row of swords on either side, about a yard in length. They are hard and tough, but supple yet and of a shiny green colour; but they will turn to brown as they wither.
In form some of it was fern-like, some cactus-like, some vaguely tree-like; but it was all outrageous, inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were the animal-like forms of life, which slithered and slunk rapaciously through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation.
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