A lean, knob-muscled navvy, who has been half-comatose, slumped in an awkward heap in his seat, rouses to the hail of these men as we pass, and becomes excited over the work. He explains that he has been in the hospital for five months, and is just on his way back to the job. The hurricane took his tent from over his head while he was eating his dinner, picked him up bodily and hurled him against a pile of railroad iron, breaking a leg and other bones. Some of his fellow-workers suffered similarly, some disappeared utterly, drowned in the opalescence, such toll does the sea take when man penetrates her mysteries too boldly with his puny strength.
Yet if man’s strength is puny his mind is bold, daring as the sea itself, and one appreciates that as the train spins on. By and by the road leaves the embankment and winds totteringly out on piling, far into the very sea itself, while above loom mighty concrete buttresses carrying a bridging of railroad iron on steel trestles. A little later it crawls beneath these trestles in the mighty space between two buttresses and as one holds his breath in suspense comes to a stop on a dock at the western tip of Knight’s Key. Beyond that the railroad in the sea is still in a measure fluent in the minds of its originators and builders, not having fully crystallized in concrete and iron. You sail thence four hours or more over the miraculous water, viewing as you go the fragments of this labor of titans slowly growing along key after key, waiting yet to be fully pieced together, till you make port beneath the friendly harbor lights of Key West.
The cleansing tides and the east winds which surge perpetually over the island keep the city of twenty thousand inhabitants serenely healthy on Key West, without wells or sewers, paving or street cleaning. Walking along the dusty streets where shack-like wooden houses are piled together in that good-natured confusion which marks the usual West Indian town, one does not go far without having a sudden impulse to shout with delight, for soon all roads lead to the verge of the island, the rich, soothing breath of the trade winds and a glimpse of the miraculous sea. You may come upon this sight as often as you will, you will never get over the sudden stab of the delight of it.
If environment is the matrix of beauty the
“As one holds his breath in suspense the road comes to a stop at the western tip of Knight’s Key”
inhabitants of this favored isle should in time rival the gods and goddesses of mythology. That they do not is probably because not enough generations have succeeded each other in these surroundings. The creatures that have been longer and more intimately born of these coral keys in this bewildering sea have caught its colors. You have but to go down to the docks to see that. Here the local fishermen bring in out of the surrounding tides fishes as rainbow-hued as the waters from which they are taken.
Perhaps the commonest fish of the Key West docks is the common “grunt,” a variety which seems to correspond in habits and size with our Northern cunner or salt water perch. As “hog and hominy” is derisively said to be the mainstay diet of the Florida “cracker,” so “grits and grunts” is the favorite food of the Key West “conch.” Yet look at the amazing little fish! His gaping mouth is orange yellow within, his tail the same color. His main color is light blue traversed with narrow lines of brassy spots mingled with olive. Beneath he is white. His back is bronze and a dozen bright blue lines on his head are separated by broad, brassy marks. Here is the amberjack, as long as your arm, a vivid silver with amber tints and a gilt band from his eye to his caudal fin. Here is the angel fish, named as well I fancy for his coloring as his shape, which latter is much that of a conventionalized, flat angel with fins which somewhat humorously represent long folded wings.
If you will go to the docks you may look over the edge and see big, semi-submerged boxes containing scores of these swimming freely, waiting for the call to go up higher. This too is a blue fish with broad yellow margins to the scales, making a scheme of color as a whole that is quite as miraculous to the Northern eye as the sea from which it is taken. It is as if the wonderful blues and greens and sapphires of gem-like transparency which the sea suggests, though it is a thousand times more beautiful than these can ever be, had been by long years of association transmitted to the fishes which swim about in it.
But the one vast, continuing marvel is the sea itself. Never for one hour of the day is the magic of its coloring alike; always each new phase is more wonderful than the last. Within its heart of mystery are continually born new dreams that pulse in nascent beauty to the rhythm of its tides, quivering to the mind of him who looks upon them with all fond longings and the bliss of noble desires. He who is privileged to see it must be base indeed if it does not call some answering glow from within him.