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"Run ahead! full speed!" the captain shouts in English; he dances with excitement, and screams in Malay; the Chinamen are climbing up the stern, over the bulwarks, everywhere, fairly boarding us; and with about a hundred and fifty souls on board, and not a white man or a Christian among them, we steam away over the gaudy water into the gaudy sunset, and beautiful, dreamy, tropical Malacca, with its palm-fringed shores, and its colored streets, and Mount Ophir with its golden history, and the stately Stadthaus, whose ancient rooms have come to seem almost like my property, are passing into memories.
In front of me, under a flashing sun, I saw the palm-fringed harbor of my dreams, a white village of thatched mud houses, a row of ugly huts above which drooped limply the flags of foreign consuls, and, far beyond, a deep blue range of mountains, forbidding and mysterious, rising out of a steaming swamp into a burning sky, and on the harbor's only pier, in blue drill uniforms and gay red caps, a group of dark-skinned, swaggering soldiers.
Then, not from the garden but from very far away, came the stone gods of Egypt and Assyria bull-bodied, bird-winged, hawk-headed, cat-headed, all in stone, and all alive and alert; strange, grotesque figures from the towers of cathedrals figures of angels with folded wings, figures of beasts with wings wide spread; sphinxes; uncouth idols from Southern palm-fringed islands; and, last of all, the beautiful marble shapes of the gods and goddesses who had held their festival on the lake-island, and bidden Lord Yalding and the children to this meeting.
They sat down in silence on the empty decks, and their eyes burned in their heads. The green harbour water chuckled at them overside. They looked at the palm-fringed hills inland, at the white houses above the harbour road, at the single tier of native craft by the quay, at the stolid soldiery sitting round the two cannon, and, last of all, at the blue bar of the horizon. Mr.
Wearily Beryl closed her eyes, as though the white lids availed to shut out visions, tantalizing as the dream of bubbling springs, and palm-fringed isles of dewy verdure, to the delirious traveller dying of thirst, in the furnace blasts of mid-desert.
For ten minutes after I reached the aërial platform of the bastion roof I had no eyes for anything except the magnificent natural cyclorama of blue water, rolling foot-hills, deep secluded valleys, and palm-fringed mountains that surrounded me; but, withdrawing my gaze reluctantly at last from the enchanting scenery, I turned my attention again to the castle and its armament.
A flaming palm-fringed shore with a prolific strip of table land 1,500 feet above it, a dense timber belt eight miles in breadth, and a volcano smoking somewhere between that and the heavens, and glaring through the trees at night, are the salient points of Kona if anything about it be salient. It is a region where falls not ". . . Hail or any snow, Or ever wind blows loudly."
The pauses at the still more southern islands on the way up from Barbadoes had been brief, but Anne had had glimpses of great fields of cane, set with the stately homes of planters, the grace of palm-fringed shores and silver sands; the awful majesty of volcanic islands, torn and racked by earthquake, eaten by fire, sometimes rising so abruptly from the sea as to imply a second half split to its base and hurled to the depths.
A Portuguese servant I had hired in Bombay cooked my dinner and looked after me generally. We sailed along the sometimes bare, and occasionally palm-fringed, shores with that indifference to time and progress which is often the despair and not unfrequently the envy of Europeans. The hubble-bubble passed from mouth to mouth, and the crew whiled away the evening hours with their monotonous chants.
Chard stood up and shielded his eyes from the still falling rain, but it was too thick for him to discern anything but the misty outline of the palm-fringed shore immediately near them.
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