At a point where the coral juts out above the sea, we leave the canoe, and start to walk about. It is very like trying to walk on a gigantic petrified hair-brush. The coral is peaked and pointed, and wrought into honeycombed sponges of stone, and there is nowhere for the foot to rest in security. Besides, the reef is covered with sea urchins possessing spines as long and sharp as a big slate-pencil, and these things pierce through any but the stoutest shoes. The colours of the sea-urchins are fascinating, and we pick up a good many, in spite of difficulties. Then there are tiger shells, shiny and spotted, in hues of orange and brown, and beautiful scarlet and pinky and lilac and chequered shells, and the daintiest of goffered clam shells, pearl white within, ivory white without, as large as a pea-pod, or as large as a vegetable dish—you may take your choice. And, if you are lucky, there is a varnished brown snail shell that you would not think worth picking up, if you did not happen to know that it has a “peacock-eye” gem, good to set in brooches, inside its plain little front door—like the homely brown toad of fable, that carried a jewel in its head. Much other spoil there is to put in your basket, and many things that you have no desire to possess at all—among them the huge hanks of slimy black string, which are alive, and wrigglesome, and not at all pleasant to put your hand on—and the wicked-faced great eels that look suddenly out of holes, and vanish, bubbling; and the revolting, leprous-spotted fish with the spiny back, that one may chance to see lurking at the bottom of a pool, every spine charged full of deadly poison for whoever touches it with unwary foot or hand. Indeed, the friends who are with you will warn you not to put your fingers into any pool, but to hook out shells and other spoil with a stick, if you want to be really careful, for there, are as many stinging and biting things among the beauties of the coral reef, as there thorns in a bed of roses.
I have secured a good many shells, and a Reckitt’s blue star-fish as big as a dinner-plate, and one or two other curiosities, and now I want, above everything else, one of those miraculous coral bouquets that bloom so temptingly just beneath the surface at this point. One of my friends asks me which I will have—with a smile, that, somehow or other, seems to amuse the rest. I select a pinky-violet one, and with some dragging and pounding, it is detached, and held up in the sun.
“Oh!” I exclaim disappointedly, and every one laughs. The beautiful bunch of coral flowers is a dirty liver-colour, and the magical hues are gone.
“It’s the water that gives the colours,” explains the coral-gatherer. “Every one is awfully disappointed about it.”
“Are there no colours at all, then?”
“Oh yes, a little shade of pinkiness, and a touch of green, and that purply-brown. But you should see the corals when they are cleaned and dried. You’d better have these, you won’t know them when they are bleached; they’re like spider’s webs and lace furbelow things, all in white.”
“Is there none of the real red stuff?” I ask somewhat ruefully, balancing myself with difficulty upon a sort of ornamental sponge-basket of spiky coral.
“Not here. All these volcanic islands have a ring of coral reef right round, but the coral is always the white kind. There’s a very little red coral in Samoa, and about Penrhyn, I believe. But, speaking generally, it’s all white in the Pacific.”
I think of the dreams of my childhood, and the delightful pictures of palmy islands circled round with a chevaux-de-frise of high spiky red coral, which used to flit before my fancy on holiday afternoons. It is true that the cold practicalities of the Voyage of the Challenger, which somebody gave me in my “flapper” days, once and for all, to my bitter disappointment, knocked the bottom out of those cherished schemes of going away to live on something like a glorified coral necklace, some day. But I wonder, as I get into the canoe again, and glide shorewards and teawards, paddled by the swift brown arms of native girls, how many grown-up people still hold to that delightful fancy, not knowing that it is as impossible to realise as a dream of rambling in the moon?
Tea is preparing on the shore when we get back, very wet and dirty, but very well pleased. The native girls among the guests immediately offer us spare dresses. It is the mode among Raratongans to take two or three dresses to a picnic, and retire every now and then into the bush to change one smart muslin or cotton “Mother Hubbard” for another—just for pure style. So there are plenty of clothes to spare, and in a minute or two the damp, sea-weedy “reefers” are fitted out with flowing garments of clean cambric and silk, of a mode certainly better adapted to the climate than the fitted garments of the “papalangi.”