Mystic Isles of the South Seas. Frederick O'Brien

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of all my reveries--a dim shadow in the far offing, a dark speck in
the lofty clouds, a mass of towering green upon the blue water, the
fast unfoldment of emerald, pale hills and glittering reef. Nearer as
sailed our ship, the panorama was lovelier. It was the culmination of
enchantment, the fulfilment of the wildest fantasy of wondrous color,
strange form, and lavish adornment.
The island rose in changing shape from the soft Pacific sea, here sheer
and challenging, there sloping gently from mountain height to ocean
sheen; different all about, altering with hiding sun or shifting view
its magic mold, with moods as varied as the wind, but ever lovely,
alluring, new.
I marked the volcanic make of it, cast up from the low bed of Neptune
an eon ago, its loftiest peaks peering from the long cloud-streamers
a mile and a half above my eyes, and its valleys embracing caverns
of shadow. It was a stupendous precipice suspended from the vault of
heaven, and in its massive folds secreted the wonders I had come so
far to see. Every minute the bewildering contours were transmuted by
the play of sun and cloud and our swift progression toward the land.
Red spots appeared rare against the field of verdure where the
mountain-side had been stripped naked by erosion, and the volcanic
cinnabar of ages contrasted oddly with the many greens of frond and
palm and hillside grove. Curious, fantastic, the hanging peaks and
cloud-capped scarps, black against the fleecy drift, were tauntingly
reminiscent of the evening skies of the last few days, as if the
divine artist had sketched lightly upon the azure of the heavens the
entrancing picture to be drawn firmly and grandly in beetling crag
and sublime steep.
Most of all, as the island swam closer, the embracing fringe of
cocoanut-trees drew my eyes. They were like a girdle upon the beautiful
body of the land, whose lower half was in the ocean. They seemed the
freewaving banners of romance, whispering always of nude peoples, of
savage whites, of ruthless passion, of rum and missionaries, cannibals
and heathen altars, of the fierce struggle of the artificial and the
primitive. I loved these palms, brothers of my soul, and for me they
have never lost their romantic significance.
From the sea, the village of Papeete, the capital and port, was all but