and intricate passage into harbour. How we ever got through the Narrows, how he picked our way amongst the reefs and islands, was a marvel. We came in so close to shore that I thought we must strike every instant, and so we should have done had there been any blundering on his part.
We went very slowly that day, as became the atmosphere and the scene, the dangers of our way, and the dignity of our guide.
“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” said Dennis, as we hung over the side. “If it’s for repairs we’ve put into Paradise, long life to the old tub and her rotten timbers! I wouldn’t have missed this for a lady’s berth in the West Indian Mail, and my passage paid!”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
This was indeed worth having gone through a good deal to see. The channel through which we picked our way was marked out by little buoys, half white and half black, and on either side the coral was just awash. Close at hand the water was emerald green or rosy purple, according to its depth and the growths below; half-a-mile away it was deep blue against lines of dazzling surf and coral sand; and the reefs and rocks amongst whose deadly edges our hideous pilot steered for our lives, were like beds of flowers bloom
ing under water. Red, purple, yellow, orange, pale green, dark green, in patches quite milky, and in patches a mass of all sorts of sea-weed, a gay garden on a white ground, shimmering through crystal! And down below the crabs crawled about, and the fishes shot hither and thither; and over the surface of the water, from reef to reef and island to island, the tern and sea-gulls skimmed and swooped about.
We anchored that evening, and the pilot went ashore. Lovely as the day had been, we were (for some mysterious reason) more tired at the end of it than on days when we had been working three times as hard. This, with Dennis, invariably led to mischief, and with Alister to intolerance. The phase was quite familiar to me now, and I knew it was coming on when they would talk about the pilot. That the pilot was admirably skilful in his trade, and that he was a most comical-looking specimen of humanity, were obvious facts. I quite agreed with both Alister and Dennis, but that, unfortunately, did not make them agree with each other. Not that Dennis contradicted Alister (he pretended to be afraid to do so), but he made comments that were highly aggravating. He did not attempt to deny that it was “a gran’ sight to see ony man do his wark weel,” or that the African negro shared with us “our common humanity and our immortal hopes,” but he
introduced the quite irrelevant question of whether it was not a loss to the Presbyterian Ministry that Alister had gone to sea. He warmly allowed that the pilot probably had his feelings, and added that even he had his; that the Hat tried them, but that the Feet were “altogether too many for them intirely.” He received the information that the pilot’s feet were “as his Creator made them,” in respectful silence, and a few minutes afterwards asked me if I was aware of the “curious fact in physiology,” that it took a surgical operation to get a joke through a Scotchman’s brain-pan.
I was feeling all-overish and rather cross myself towards evening, and found Alister’s cantankerousness and Dennis O’Moore’s chaff almost equally tiresome. To make matters worse, I perceived that Dennis was now so on edge, that to catch sight of the black pilot made him really hysterical, and the distracting thing was, that either because I was done up, or because such folly is far more contagious than any amount of wisdom, I began to get quite as bad, and Alister’s disgust only made me worse. I unfeignedly dreaded the approach of that black hat and those triangular feet, for they made me giggle in spite of myself, and I knew a ship’s rules far too well not to know how fearful would be the result of any public exhibition of disrespect.