The Confessions of a BeachcomberBanfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
History
The Confessions of a Beachcomber
Banfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
Dunk Island (Qld.); Natural history -- Australia -- Queensland
How is it that a one-armed man, slight in physique, whose brains have
been addled by blows with billets of firewood, whose side is raw and
bleeding, and who has a broken rib hampering his movements, is able to
achieve feats that would be surprising if performed by a whole and
stalwart individual? "Yorky" has always been a wonder, and his life a
series of adventures and arduous tasks, which seem to prove that the
loss of a limb has been compensated for by hardihood and resourcefulness
worth a great deal more.
A BUTTERFLY REVERIE
"And laugh
At gilded butterflies, and bear poor rogues
Talk of Court news."
There were but three men and a dog in the boat, but the boat was
overburdened. Not that the dog was big, or the men either. It was all on
account of the day.
It was a day in which you wanted the whole realm of Nature for
yourself--so full of sunshine and flitting butterflies was it--so beaming
with the advent of summer, and her fervent greetings, so wondrously calm
and clear. You felt selfish at the pleasure of it all. It filled you
well-nigh to surfeit, yet you would have more of it. It was too
delicious to squander upon others, yet how could one mind comprehend the
grandeur of it all?
The white boat drifted on a blue and lustrous sea. The reef points
tapped a monotonous scale as the white sails swang to the swaying of the
gaff. Listlessly the boat drifted to the barely perceptible swell,
regular as the breathings of a sleeping child. Sound and motion invited
to slumber. The shining sea, the islands, green and purple, the soft
sweet atmosphere, the full glory of a rare day, kept all the senses in
tune.
There, 4 miles away, lay the island, and close at hand the turtle were
ever and anon rising, balloon-like, from coral gardens to gulp greedy
draughts of air, which not even the salty essences of the ocean could
rob of its perfume.
Sometimes the boat did seem conscious of inconstancy, and anon with
feminine frivolity she would coyly swing round to flirt with the islets
close at hand. She would have her own way until the free breezes came,
and somehow the wind still blows whereso'er it listeth, and will not be
untimely wooed, though the sailor whistles with all the "lascivious
pleasing of the lute."
Some atmospheric phenomenon, altogether beyond idle concern, lifted the
islands afar off out of the water, suspending them in the sky. The
languorous breadths of the sea gradually changed to silver, and under
the purple islands the silver band extended, bright and gleaming, until
it seemed to merge again into the blue of the sky. That was so, for was
it not all visible--the purple islands, with the silver bands separating
them from the sea. Yet under ordinary conditions those very islands are
blue studs set in the rim of the ocean. What magic is it that uplifts
them to-day between the ocean and the sky?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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