"One passenger after another came peeping sleepily out of the companion-hatch at the men clearing away the wreck of the spars, and swabbing the quarter-deck down; but scarce had Smith, one of the young writers, reached the poop, when he gave a shout that covered both poop-ladders in no time, with people scrambling over each other to get up. Next minute you'd have fancied them a knot of flamingoes with their wings out, as the bright red daybreak brought out the edge of the woods far astern, through a hazy lane in the purple mist, topped so with stray cocoa-nut trees and cabbage-palms, dabbled like brushes in the colour, that they scarce knew them to be woods at all, and not a whole lot of wild savages fresh from other business of the kind, coming down with all sorts of queer tools upon us; more especially when one heard such a chorus of unaccountable cries, whistling and screaming, as seemed to struggle with the sound of the sea ahead of us, and the plash alongside. "The huge round sun struck hot crimson along the far turn of the reach, with all manner of twisted blots upon _him_, as it were, and the very grass and long reeds seemingly rustling into his face, so one didn't for the moment know him either; while the muddy chocolate-coloured eddies, sweeping and closing beyond the ship's rudder, glittered and frothed up like blood; and every here and there, along the streak of light, the head of a log or a long branch came dipping up terribly plain--no wonder the old _Seringapatam_ had apparently turned tail to it all, ready to bolt if she could. "Almost as soon as you took your hands off your eyes, though, and could see without a red ball or two before them--_there_ was the nearest shore growing out toward our starboard bulwark all along, crowded with wet green woods, up into steaming high ground--all to eastward a dazzle of light, with two or three faint mountain-peaks shooting up far off in it, and a woody blue hill or so between; while here and there a broad bright hazy spoke of the sun's great wheel came cutting down into the forest, that brought out a patch full of long big leaves, ten times greener than the rest, and let you look off the deck into the heart of it amongst the stems over the bank. The jabber in the woods had passed off all at once with the dusk, the water deepening over the bar, and the tide running slower, so that everyone's confused face turned breathless with delight as it grew stiller and stiller.