They got the boat off, and in a few minutes were out in the lagoon, Isbel forward, Floyd at the sculls, and Schumer in the stern sheets.
"There's breeze enough for the sail," said Schumer, when they were a hundred yards or so out. "Shove the mast up, and we'll take it easy. I want to have a full look at the floor of this lagoon, and take my time over it."
Floyd took in the sculls, and, helped by Isbel, who seemed to have a good knowledge of boat craft, got the mast stepped. Then they shook the sail out, and the boat scarcely heeling to the gentle breeze, they made straight across the stretch of water between them and the northernmost beach.
The floor of the lagoon was not of equal depth; near the break in the reef it was thirty-fathom water, shoaling swiftly to ten and five. The whole western half of the lagoon was three fathoms and under. At several places in this shallow zone the coral floor rose sharply and nearly reached the surface. It was necessary, indeed, to unstep the mast and take to the sculls, while Isbel, leaning over the bow, conned them.
The water was so clear that the shadow of the boat showed hard on the sand patches; looking down, the eye was held by a thousand things beautiful and strange. Color dwells like a wizard in tropical and subtropical waters; it seems inherent in those seas. Shells, fish, and coral all are gorgeous, and more than gorgeous—exquisite. Here seem to lie the remnants of a world more beautiful than any world we know—the ruins of a paradise.
Coral alone presents to us a whole world of art; its colors and its forms are infinite, and the artists of Paris or Tokyo make nothing more beautiful than the million art treasures eternally being formed in the depths and the shallows of the sea. Not only in the Pacific, but the Atlantic, not only in the Atlantic, but the Indian Ocean, from three-fathom water to a mile deep the construction of the beautiful is eternally in progress, unviewed and almost unknown.
Floyd, resting on his oars now and then, looked over into the luminous depths where flights of painted fish passed, their shadows following them over the sand patches and brain coral.
Here and there were streaks of dead and rotten coral of a seaweed brown, and here and there veritable gardens of color. Great shells moved about on the sand patches, crabs scurried hither and thither, globe-shaped jellyfish passed clear as glass, showing up for the moment by reflected light, and then vanishing like ghosts. Schumer, his battered old panama tilted back to protect his neck from the sun, seemed absorbed in the things below; he spoke scarcely a word, unless to give direction to the rower; Isbel, heedless of the sun, was equally absorbed. Always on the lookout for the shoal water, she said nothing except to give the direction "To the right," "To the left," and on the heaving of a sudden rock up through the brilliant water, "Ah, stop hard!"
The whole of this western part of the lagoon was very difficult water; unless buoyed it would be utterly unnavigable by a ship even of small tonnage.
Schumer, having explored the northernmost part of this zone, gave directions to Floyd to pull farther south.