Let us imagine our exploration from the beginning. It is a calm morning in summer, the sea a pearl of beauty, under the new-risen sun. The heat, great even in the early morning, is unnoticed in enjoyment of the delicate pink and blue and golden shades reflected by the mirror-like surface, unbroken by any indication of what lies below. The tints of reef and shoal, which form so beautiful a part of the seascape when the water is rippled, are now exchanged for atmospheric colours, which, as we float over from deep to shallow water, give place to a panorama of coral gardens below. _Plate XXIX_ [Illustration: Fig. 61] [Illustration: Fig. 62] [Illustration: Fig. 63] Mushroom Corals Fig. 61. _Herpolitha_, an elongated fungid Fig. 62. The young form of _Fungia_ Fig. 63. A typical _Fungia_-disc As we row, keeping watch ahead, the reef seems suddenly to spring up before us, so steep is its slope. The pleasure of the sight of a new and beautiful world of shapes and colours, mimicking yet utterly unlike those of life on land, is for us enhanced by the vigour of its life and growth, in happy contrast to the desert shore. On the edge of the shoal _Porites_ and other solid forms appear as great rocky buttresses among the lighter plant-like growths, or, a little way from it may rise from the depths as an isolated pillar. In many places in the Red Sea such coral pinnacles abound in comparatively deep water, a horror of unexpected danger to the sailor. There is nothing more fascinating than the edge of a reef in the open sea, where numbers of forms and their delightful groupings can be seen in succession, one below another, till they become hazy and gradually lost in the blue depths, sixty to ninety feet below us. There are precipices clothed with a thick bush of spreading coral, some seeking the light by reaching out horizontally, others by growing upwards tree fashion, what appear to be bare rocks turning out to be massive colonies, as much alive as the more plant-like forms, caves, dark in contrast to the bright corals that surround their mouths, and the white shell-sand with which they are floored.