As the days passed and the Mirabelle pursued her long course through tropical water, Chris, with many free hours to occupy, at last understood how the model of the Mirabelle had been so painstakingly arranged inside a bottle. For the time seemed long between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked yearningly toward the land and the greenness. A warm breath of flowers, damp moss, and leaves in the sun would mingle with the rough salt smell of the sea. Chris and Amos imagined to themselves what the forest or the mountainsides would be like if they could only land and investigate them.
Now and again small flocks of birds, migrating perhaps or blown out to sea, would land on the Mirabelle, and Ned Cilley made a large cage for some of the sweet-singing gaily feathered creatures for Chris and Amos. And on one occasion when the Mirabelle was sailing past Brazil, a flock of butterflies was carried out on a breeze from shore and hung on the rigging until the boys imagined themselves in a blossoming wood.
Chris had found, his first day at sea, the conch shell Mr. Wicker had mentioned, and he alone of all the Mirabelle's crew knew how the Venture had fared.
That first evening, in the little cabin Captain Blizzard had given Chris and Amos, Chris had waited impatiently for Amos to sleep. The two boys each had a hammock swung across the cabin by night which they rolled up and put away to give more room by day. But that first night poor Chris had begun to despair that he would ever hear Mr. Wicker's voice from the shell, for Amos was excited and had no wish to go to sleep. He swung back and forth, happy as a dark bird in his hammock, his round eyes looking toward the porthole where there was a faint gleam of night sea.
"Chris," Amos said, "we're sure going on a mighty far trip! That Mister Finney, he showed me on a map, but I never heard of any of the places we pass by. The Bahamas, he say to me, then the West Indies, Cuba, Barbadoes"—he was ticking them off on his fingers as he named them—"an' on to South America. Away down at the tippy end around—what's the name of that loud-named place?"
"Cape Horn?" Chris said. He was scarcely listening.
Amos tried to prop himself up on his elbow and promptly fell out of the hammock in a flurry of arms and legs and a heavy landing thump that brought a shout of laughter from Chris. After an attempt at making his bed again in the hammock, and some little difficulty in clambering safely back in again, Amos composed himself with the least possible movement in his swinging bed and yawned.
"I disremember," he said, "where else we're going. Wise Man islands, or Solemn Islands—"