第2章 AN ISLAND LANDFALL(2)

Thence we bore away along shore.On our port beam we might hear the explosions of the surf;a few birds flew fishing under the prow;there was no other sound or mark of life,whether of man or beast,in all that quarter of the island.Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,the CASCO skimmed under cliffs,opened out a cove,showed us a beach and some green trees,and flitted by again,bowing to the swell.The trees,from our distance,might have been hazel;the beach might have been in Europe;the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps,and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath.Again the cliff yawned,but now with a deeper entry;and the CASCO,hauling her wind,began to slide into the bay of Anaho.The cocoa-palm,that giraffe of vegetables,so graceful,so ungainly,to the European eye so foreign,was to be seen crowding on the beach,and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains.Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand;it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains.In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured,roosting and nestling there like birds about a ruin;and far above,it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit.

Under the eastern shore,our schooner,now bereft of any breeze,continued to creep in:the smart creature,when once under way,appearing motive in herself.From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs;a bird sang in the hillside;the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us;and,presently,a house or two appeared,standing high upon the ankles of the hills,and one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden.These conspicuous habitations,that patch of culture,had we but known it,were a mark of the passage of whites;and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel.It was longer ere we spied the native village,standing (in the universal fashion)close upon a curve of beach,close under a grove of palms;the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef.For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf.'The coral waxes,the palm grows,but man departs,'says the sad Tahitian proverb;but they are all three,so long as they endure,co-haunters of the beach.The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks,near the south-easterly corner of the bay.Punctually to our use,the blow-hole spouted;the schooner turned upon her heel;the anchor plunged.It was a small sound,a great event;my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up;and I,and some part of my ship's company,were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.

Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the hamlet.It contained two men:one white,one brown and tattooed across the face with bands of blue,both in immaculate white European clothes:the resident trader,Mr.Regler,and the native chief,Taipi-Kikino.'Captain,is it permitted to come on board?'