We had no spirit for the revels of our comrades, for chasing the bright-hued birds, or plucking the gleaming flowers. We were both happier to lie looking over the sea where our dainty ships rocked, and dreamily talk over Harry's Italianate notions that rose unbidden here. Being to me now of undreamed-of interest, since my old faith was gone, they were a subject we could talk on more as we used to do.
'Surely,' I remember him saying, 'surely that Italian friar was right who told me that the soul was not in the body. Can you not feel here, Jasper, how great a thing it is? Can you not feel how there is something that binds you like a brother to all this music of bird and leaf and air and sea? What can it be but the great soul of the universe. That is it, and the friar was right. It is that great soul which is not in our bodies, rather are our bodies in the soul—the soul that is yours and mine and hers and God's.'
So would our speech always come back to our sorrow and part us again. Yet were we too drunken with the western wine to feel the past too deeply. Thus, then, once or twice during our stay there we had speech of these things, and I began to hope still more that some day we might be the same again together, and, moreover, to feel that I was beginning to understand what it was he thought of the great universal secret.
On the third day after our coming to the island we sailed again, greatly refreshed, and in two days more we had sight of Tierra-Firme, being the high land above Santa Marta, but came not near the shore, that we might not be seen. So without sight of Carthagena we passed on, till on the 12th of July we dropped anchor off the haven whither we were bound.
It was a spot our captain had noted on his voyage the last year, not only as being sheltered by two high points from the winds and a very commodious harbour, but also because no Spaniard had any dwelling between this place and Santiago de Tolu on the one hand and Nombre de Dios on the other, the nearest being at least thirty-five leagues distant. Moreover, there was an abundance of food there, both fish in the sea and fowls in the woods around, the most plentiful being certain birds like to our pheasants, which the Spaniards in those regions call guans and curassows. It was by reason of the great store of these delicate fowls that our captain named the place Port Pheasant.
Overhung with a dense growth of trees.—p. 239
It must be remembered we had our three pinnaces to set up, for in them we were to make our attack. It was most necessary then to have a hidden place for this work, and it was not a little his knowledge of this secret haven that gave our captain his great hopes of success. He judged no one knew it but himself and those who had been with him in his previous voyage. Being thus perfectly secure, Frank rowed in to see how best to bring the ships to moorings there, and I went in the boat.
No place could have been better fitted to our purpose. The headlands were but half a cable's length apart, and so overhung with a dense growth of brakes and trees, all strange to me, that little could be seen beyond save the climbing hills on the mainland. But as soon as we rowed in I could see what a paradise it was.