Todd, in a passion of romantic interest that was part of the whole
marvellous epic, climbed to the deck before dawn. The stars, he fancied,
looked coldly upon him, as if they resented his presence at their coming
defeat. He leaned far over, watching waves that lapped the sides of the
ship in a strange rhythm. Under the brightening day he stared across an
ocean apparently as eternal and infinite as space, that stretched, he
knew, north and south beyond him, twelve thousand miles of unbroken
liquid desert from pole to pole. And yet through the centuries, this
perilous waste had been crossed from oasis to island oasis by the frail
canoes of men;--dark Polynesian painted savages with marvellous powers
of carving and inlaying, who had left traces of their coming from New
Zealand to Alaska, and through the Philippines to Japan. He pictured the
advent of that first dusky Ulysses who, in feathered armor and a Greek
helmet carved from a cinnamon-tree, had here, ages before, terminated
his thousand-mile wanderings from a forgotten South. All this had now
become a new world for Todd's own light-haired Saxon race to fall heir
to, stepping-stones in its inevitable stride to the teeming coasts of
Asia.
Yuki, too, in such excitement that she could barely stop to dress, had
been staring out of the port-hole of her stateroom since an early hour.
If one of the great birds swooping incessantly along the sides of the
ship had paused to look, he would have seen a small face, white as
himself, fitted into the round brass frame. She was there before dawn
had quickened under the sea. The mystery and the first unspeakable
shiver of a newly created day had been hers. "'And God moved upon the
face of the waters,'" whispered reverent Oriental lips. She saw the
first dark triangle of land glide toward her through the thinning
darkness,--the shimmer of rose and green on half-veiled slopes, the
gradual lighting up of tapering peaks,--and then, the full orchestration
of the risen sun.
She reached the deck to find not only Mr. Todd, but the greater number
of the passengers, assembled to watch the gorgeous spectacle from the
entrance of Honolulu Bay. Night had rolled up from the sleepy town, and
surged in great sails of pearl-tinted cloud up dark blue-green gullies
of the hills. Red scars of volcanic slopes burned through the morning,
whole peaks seemed incandescent, and terraced gardens, cleared from
lower mists, stood outlined in reflected orange light.
A few moments more, and the iridescent pageant vanished. Down on the
shore, rude wharves and freight-sheds and cheap, new-painted boat-houses
stared out impertinently. Back of the harbor front the little town
nestled prettily enough in its setting of tropic greens, and half-way up
the volcanic cliffs patches of tilled fields or clumps of forest-trees
relieved the sandy wastes. At intervals a tall white house among its
palms shone out like a child's block, half imbedded in moss.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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