"However, the lagoon itself being broad enough and round enough in all conscience, with a deep hollow opening up out of it on the high ground, the judge and the cadets thought a better place couldn't have been chosen for landing after a little sport, while we left the fair ladies to rest in the cool, and look at the lotus-lilies spread all over one cove of it, floating white on their large leaves. The green edge of scum ran about the black shadow on the rest of it, gathering round where a big branch or two had fallen in, with the hot white sky looking bluer out through the broad leaves coming together aloft, and the showers of little sharp ones in the tamarind twigs, mangoes, ironwood, sumach, and all sorts, while here and there a knot of crimson blossoms looked out from under the boughs in the dark, humming with small flies. Beautiful spot as it was every way, especially after the heat, yet I didn't much like the idea of letting the ladies stay by themselves, except the sailor and the kitmagar. Nothing particular had turned up to trouble us, certainly, but I daresay 'twas because there was _one_ of them I never looked at without her soft fairy-like air making me think of something that might happen to her, life-like though she seemed. When I saw a big branch over her head, I kept fancying what it would do if it fell--and now, the thumping slabs and stones we scrambled over up into the gully toward the mountain, seemed to have come tumbling down off it to the very water's edge, covered with nets of thick creeping plants and trails of flat, fingery-leaved flowers, such as you see in hot-houses at home. A few yards higher, too, where the ground broke away into a slanting hollow out of the bush, 'twas all trampled and crushed, half-withering together in the heat of the sun, the young trees twisted and broken, and two or three good-sized ones lying out from the roots, which I set to the score of the timbers rolling down their logs, for some craft that evidently got their cargoes hereaway.