Beatrice Grimshaw

“ The island was all sand and wind and sun; it seemed to be steeped in light and heat. Light flashed from. the windy palms that shook always against the white-hot sky; light sparked back from the hard, sword-like pandanus leaves, and struck clear through the thin tangles of creeper and liana, as if they had been made of glass. Light beat in one's face from the glaring sand and flashed from a brazen sea. There was not a spot of shade on the whole place, save in the hot, verandaless houses, where the party of contacts hastened to carry their belongings and their food. ”

“ Mountains and forests and rifts through the heart of the hills; pure wreaths of foam floating above waterfalls unseen; tree tops felted to green and golden velvet and flowing—flowing—to the verge of the horizon and beyond, a seamless robe of exceeding beauty; the crystal sun and the pale, bright maiden blue of high-level skies; airs of Paradise blowing.
How can I tell in words the solitary, unstained wonder of it all?
"Does no one live here?" asked Rothery when he had caught his errant breath again.
"You may say no one. The village is the only one for a long way. ”

“ A STORM was raging in the first-floor front of Metropole Mansions, Sydney (“a home from home; apartments with or without; replete with every comfort and excellent cuisine; night porter, hot and cold water”) . Outside, the day was a true Australian day of gold and blue; a brisk wind blew from the harbor; red roofs and green gardens shone beside speedwell-colored water. The trams roared by in the wind and the sun, carying loads that seemed composed of fluttering gauze veils and muslin dresses, for it was Saturday afternoon, and all young Sydney (and how much of Sydney is young!) ”

“ After that there was nothing any more, just the blue sea, and the burning sky, and the circling and hovering bronze sea-hawks, busy with their fishing again.
“Is it real?” asked the Marquis, his hands flat on the sand, supporting his huge body, his eyes staring, like the fixed eyes of a doll, out to the empty sea. “Flint, what shall a man say when he sees a thing like that? This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men encounter death out there at one’s eyes and sit and look as calm as this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no emotion no more than me.” ”

“ A calm has fallen—a Pacific calm, which is not as highly distinguished for calmness as the stay-at-home reader might suppose. There is no wind, and the island we are trying to reach remains tantalisingly perched on the extreme edge of the horizon, like a little blue flower on the rim of a crystal dish. But there is plenty of sea—long glittering hills of water, rising and falling, smooth and foamless, under the ship, which they fling from side to side with cruel violence. The great booms swing and slam, the blocks clatter, the masts creak. ”

“ Sight and hearing are not the only senses that a bushman can use to good effect. I smelt, cautiously and without noise.
There was the marshy odor of the river behind the palms. There was the indescribable smell of a native village—dry, sun-baked earth, insanitary whiffs of decaying stuff, the hay-like odor of old thatch. And something more—the smell of cocoanut-oil, warm and fresh, and very near.
I remembered that the Papuan always oils himself after bathing. I recollected having seen Mo in the river.
Very cautiously I stretched out and touched the Marquis's hand. ”

“ Kara Bay is the sort of place a man might go to die in, if he felt like it, but it is not the sort of place any one would ever want to live in. As a matter of fact, no one ever has lived there.
The bay is like a black-lip shell, in curve and in color. The sand is like powdered cinder to look at, and as hot as the innocent-looking iron door of a furnace to feel. Behind comes a belt of poisonous painty-green low bush; behind that again, forest, so dark and tangled that it shows black even at midday. ”

“ All the same, she was just a little nigger, and the Marquis never ought to have flattered her by taking notice of her. It puts them out of their place.
Still, he went on dancing, and I really forgot about the girl for a little, watching him. It was so good, and the scene was so extraordinary—the open space of sandy soil, all lit up by the moon, and that great figure, dancing with incomparable lightness, against the background of long banana leaf and slender betel palm, like a very new sort of fairy in a very strange kind of fairy glade. ”

“ None of us want anything better; none of us think there can be anything better, among the wonders that the Great South Seas yet hold in store.
Tiki-Hau is an island of the atoll or ring-shaped type, a splendid circle of seventy and eighty-foot palms, enclosing an inner lagoon clear and still as glass. Outside the windy palms, a dazzling beach runs down to the open sea all round the island—a beach that is like nothing the travellers ever have seen before, for it is made of powdered coral, and is as white as salt, as white as starch, as white as the hackneyed snow-simile itself can paint it. ”

“ Coral beds, when you see them from the surface on a calm day, are like a garden of flowers below the water. Seen from beneath the ocean itself, they take on the hues of actual jewels: the huge fans and mushrooms and ferns of the reef glow with lights of emerald, sapphire, and amethyst; the sun that falls through the water makes magical fires of gold and green. Fish come gently past the windows of your helmet, hurrying not at all, and look in with their cold eyes as they go by ”

“ On the ship the decks were darkened by cool awnings; people lay in long, cane chairs, reading, smoking, calling the black boys to bring iced drinks, and watching the matchless panorama of the midtropic world slide by. Sometimes they went for days without a sight of land; again, group after group of fairy islets came and stayed and passed beyond the rail; smoking volcanoes reared their dragon-heads; canoes with crab-claw sails and wild brown sailors clad in a scarlet waist-cloth and a knife went flying by upon the barest surface of the sea.
The passengers were very content to take life easy. ”