From that time we have been indifferent to our crawling
pace, except for the sick man's sake. The days dawn in rose colour
and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious
blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so dreamlike, an
ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted region of perpetual calm,
and an endless summer. Far off, for many an azure league, rims of
rock, fringed with the graceful coco palm, girdle still lagoons, and
are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks
all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myriads of flying fish and a
few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the
scarcely undulating water. But we look in vain for the "sails of
silk and ropes of sendal," which are alone appropriate to this
dream-world. The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue
expanse, pure and lonely, an almost untraversed sea. We revel in
these tropic days of transcendent glory, in the balmy breath which
just stirs the dreamy blue, in the brief, fierce crimson sunsets, in
the soft splendour of the nights, when the moon and stars hang like
lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and in the pearly
crystalline dawns, when the sun rising through a veil of rose and
gold "rejoices as a giant to run his course," and brightens by no
"pale gradations" into the "perfect day.
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