That keep the hue and polish of the wave.
Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in Exodus. The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery the natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of the strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were. Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road. Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the American's observation. Smith's Bible Dictionary discusses learnedly the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae eruthra thalassa] in the Septuagint. The Dictionary surmises that the name was derived from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under our American's notice. On one occasion the diver observed, while under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple, the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the venous hue of deoxidized life-currents.
The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in tiny tubes.
This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas. The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The Photocaris lights a flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.
As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas, so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.
About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more tedious by delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the return cargo. From Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been removed. The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the Maine law of the Celestials. The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer the cargo in the outer harbor.
It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton. The three make a semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon. A coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler affects to play "I spy"—only affects, for she does not care for the authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.
But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer, like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes, the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.
From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal, looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay—the coral insect, which was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand. Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China merchant, and he did.
Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities—one inland, narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers. They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They will defy a sentry on shipboard—steal his ship from under him while he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers, as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels. Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel in her matrix of sand and coral.