moon, prolong the royal note of colour. Heavy purple
clouds, children born of the night, lie upon the peaks
and in the valleys. As the day grows they gather
together and sweep away to sea, the playthings of the
red-lipped dawn ; or else they sink in soft mists into
the valleys where they were born. The ship steers
straight for the east, as the risen sun shelters for a
moment behind a shield of cloud, his glory effulgent
behind it, and manifest in the downpour of gold, and
in the cloud’s rim of fire. Then very swiftly he
emerges,- and the colours change; soft niagaras of
cloud pervade the secluded places of the hills ; pale
mountains, scarcely more real than the sky above them,
rise up on the distant horizon ; and the ship, swinging
round, enters upon a long canal of sea, between the
mainland and a cathedral island on our right. Flights,
of pagodas glitter in the sun, and rich woods climb
the opposing shores. Fishing boats with square sails,
on a point trail over the complacent sea.
And it is thus within the space of a night and half
a day that I come from the thoroughfares of a crowded,
an aggressive, a commercial city, to the threshold of
a strange country of nameless islands, of so many
fascinations that to escape from one is only to fall
into the happy toils of another. In its wooded and:
unexplored island interiors, in its secluded bays and
silent backwaters, in its little valleys of nameless rivers,
in its company of unascended peaks, there lies a perpetual
appeal to the imagination. And Fame has not
yet come with her train to stale their infinite variety.
490
Leaving the City
MERGUI
Mergui, as I see it from the Ramapoora, is a narrow
strait, with a double-peaked island on one side, and a
low, palm-clad shore, rising to a hilly eminence', on the
other. On this shore is built the town, a long line of
thatched huts on piles' along the water’s edge. The
summit of the hill is crowned with a white pagoda o f
golden rings and a glittering spire, with monasteries
of many roofs, with
a great court-house,
and the houses of
the British officers.
A long jetty of
rough stone protrudes
across the
foreshore into the
w a t e r . T w o
launches l i e a t
anchor, four cutters,
and a multitude
of little native craft. While I am yet engaged
upon the scene before me, there enters up the ladder
a yellow mariner, with a sea-tanned face, a grizzled
beard, a straw hat in a white cloth cover and black
ribbon, seedy clothes held together by large iridescent
mother-of-pearl buttons. His name, he states with a
flourish, is Captain Le Fevre, and he launches forthwith
into the true adventure.
“ This,” he remarks, embracing the settlement in a