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Updated: June 1, 2025
Farther away beyond fields, pastures, and marsh lands were the rocky bluffs of Malden, the wood-crowned heights russet and crimson with the first tinges of autumn. Eastward was the harbor with its wave-washed islands, and the blue ocean sparkling in the sunlight. White sails were fading and vanishing on the far distant horizon. Ships were riding at anchor between the town and castle.
Out of that leaf-writing, and bark-etching, and later rune, have grown the printed writings of mankind. Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare are the lineal descendants of the man who made holes in a leaf, or lines on a wave-washed sand. Out of the finger-counting have grown up book-keeping, geometry, mathematical astronomy and a knowledge of the higher curves.
Past the gay-coloured shipping of the noisy Marina, past the wave-washed halls of Tiberius’ palazzo a mare, our boat swiftly glides over the pellucid expanse until it reaches those vast towering cliffs of limestone that spring almost perpendicular from the waters’ edge to the plateau of Ana-Capri, fully a thousand feet above our heads.
Picture, then, the scene to these wanderers of the northern seas: the long coral reef, wave-washed by bluest of seas; the little village and burying-ground and priests' houses nestling under the cocoanut grove at one end of the semicircular bay, the village where Terreeoboo, king of the island, dwelt on the long sand beach at the other end; and swimming through the water like shoals of fish, climbing over the ships' rigging like monkeys, crowding the decks of the Discovery so that the ship heeled over till young chief Pareea began tossing the intruders by the scuff of the neck back into the sea hundreds, thousands, of half-naked, tawny-skinned savages welcoming the white men back to the islands discovered by them.
The eye of any observer who cared for such things swept over the wave-washed town, and the bay beyond, and the Isle, with its pebble bank, lying on the sea to the left of these, like a great crouching animal tethered to the mainland. On the extreme east of the marine horizon, St. Aldhelm's Head closed the scene, the sea to the southward of that point glaring like a mirror under the sun.
Before many hours he had divested himself of his remaining garments, and was swimming easily and unencumbered toward the east. The first faint evidence of dawn was paling the stars ahead of him when the dim outlines of a low-lying black mass loomed up directly in his track. A few strong strokes brought him to its side it was the bottom of a wave-washed derelict.
The mole, living always in the dark and in the dirt, is yet as clean as the otter or the wave-washed seal; and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes, and leaping among jagged storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and stainless as a bird.
And when midnight was near I made harangue to him. "'This chief, this Tummasook, hath a copper kettle, likewise a kerosene can. I put a rock, smooth and wave-washed, in Moosu's hand. 'The camp is hushed and the stars are winking. Go thou, creep into the chief's igloo softly, and smite him thus upon the belly, and hard.
He lay awake long enough to be pleasantly conscious that the wind had increased to a gale, and to be lulled again to sleep by the cosy security of the heavily timbered and tightly sealed dwelling that seemed to ride the storm like the ship it resembled. The gale swept through the piles beneath him and along the gallery as through bared spars and over wave-washed decks.
Yet all of this I did; and God knows that many a time since I have thanked Him for it upon my knees. I saw first the thing bobbing up and down behind a bare wave-washed rock that lifted a hoary crown close beside the water's edge. A branch from off some tree, I thought, until I had taken a half-dozen curious steps nearer, and felt my heart bound as I knew it to be a boat.
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