They had but the day and the evening, and the Major suggested a run across the island to the beach at Chuaka where the surf of the Indian Ocean beats all day and a cool wind blows even in the hot season. Zanzibar, he said, was but a bigger Mombasa so far as the native town went, but nowhere else on the coast would you find tangle of banana and orange and lime and coconut and mango and almond and areca and date, with here and there a grove of cassuarinas or cloves, to match this. He was right. They skirted the banks of low swampy rivers lovely with blue water-lilies and reeds and scarlet dragon-flies; ran through plantations of grey austere coconut trees through which the sunlight trickled down on to thin sparse olive grass; left clusters of brown huts set in small patches of delicately-leaved red-stemmed muhoga; climbed the two hundred feet of the Liliputian hill of coral that makes the backbone of the island; came out on to that plain at its summit where English bracken grows and a sweet yellow shrub that might, at a distance, be English gorse; and descended at last through groves of orange trees, the fruit scattered in lavish profusion on the very road, to the collector's house at Chuaka. He was a polite Goanese, and he made them tea, serving them himself on his barazza which was hung out from the first floor over the very beach beneath, where the white coral sand glistened in the sun and the surf beat in perpetually. Thereafter they strolled off, theoretically to look for shells, though no one did much looking: Jardine because he did not care for shells; Muriel because, after her kind, she wanted honestly to reach a distant point and see what lay beyond; Ursula because she was utterly entranced by the stretch of the foreshore, with the riot of vegetation ever invading the sands and ever, in its outposts of mangrove, the very sea itself; and Paul because he was beginning to realise that he cared about collecting nothing except Ursula. Muriel and the Major were thus soon out of sight. Ursula and Paul, having wasted half an hour watching the antics of a naked kiddie in a miniature outrigger canoe which he finally ran ashore with consummate ease and made fast with the skill of an ancient mariner, found a great mass of coral rock which overhung a pool that was one enchanted garden of colour and life. They both waded in till Ursula had her skirts high above her knees, and Paul's uprolled trousers showed a good couple of inches of soaked territory. "Look!" she cried. "Paul, do you see that sea-urchin? Look! In there. Oh, my dear, do you see its spines? Satiny brown, spotted with blue and red. Could you get it?" "If I die in the attempt," said Paul manfully, giving a fresh tug to his trousers and moving cautiously forward. Here was promise of the Claxted vivarium at last!