Those are the tropics of the novelist and the traveller who wants to make his untravelled readers envious. As a story-writer I have myself sinned thus; wherefore, partly, this confession.
The trouble with most people who have described the tropics in fiction and otherwise is that they leave too much out. All that they put in is correct. You really can see all these beauties, and more, between Cancer and Capricorn; but you don’t see them everywhere or all the time.
Another very serious fault with your tropical word-artist is that he generally ignores the swamps, the fevers, the agues, the rains which come down like bursting water-spouts, the hurricanes which blow brick and stone walls about as if they were paper. Further, as to the rippling sunlit sea, they too often omit to state that, when it is inclined that way it can get up into waves which will take a ship clean over a reef and land it halfway up a hillside, and that it has a swell through which a ship may wallow for days, rolling scuppers under every minute of the day and night for weeks on end.
This, by the way, is one of the most villainous features of the tropical Pacific. For instance, you wake up out of a nightmare-slumber, bruised and sore and sweating, after hours of sleepy struggle to brace yourself somehow between the sides of your berth so that you may not be flung against the opposite side of your cabin. You watch for a favourable moment—the best one is just when she is going to stop and your side is down. Miss this, and you’ll wish you’d waited for the next.
In spite of all your precautions your luggage has broken loose and has taken charge of the floor. Nothing is where you put it the night before.
Your hair-brushes are under the lower berth in the farthest possible corner. Your tooth-brush is probably on the other side under the sofa; and your box of tooth-powder has got into one of your boots and has emptied itself there. Your bath-sponge has probably carried away from the rack, and got itself saturated with the contents of your only bottle of scent, which has dashed itself to pieces in its struggles to leap out of its appointed place.
You squeeze this sorrowfully out into the tumbler, if there’s one left unbroken. At peril of life and limb you grope around and find your deck-shoes, and then you start out for the bathroom. The ship is groaning and shuddering like a man with tertian ague and toothache. If your sea-legs are good you get there without a broken limb or many additions to your bruises.
The water in the bath is having a miniature storm all to itself. The bath is usually marble nowadays, and very hard. If you lie down in it you are absolutely at the mercy of the raging waters, and they dash you from side to side, and end to end till you struggle feebly to your feet and try to stand.
You clutch at anything for support. Sometimes, as happened to a fellow-voyager of mine, it is the steam-pipe for heating the water, and off comes the skin in a twinkling. When you have got into something like an erect position you keep yourself from being hurled out with one hand and pull the string of the shower with the other.
“Swish,” comes the douche, and you have a moment of cooling luxury. Then follows the slow inexorable heave of the next roll. You hold on, partly to the string; the water rises up on one side of the bath and slops over, probably filling your shoes. The douche leaves you, crosses the bathroom at an angle of sixty degrees, and drenches your pyjamas, and, peradventure, your towels as well. If this has not happened, you stagger out and dry yourself in the intervals of trying to sit or stand.