CHAPTER X
THE ISLE OF GREEN STAIRWAYS
After a refreshing but cautious draught, the shipwrecked sailor tumbled on a clump of fern under a colonnade of royal palms, and fell asleep. The sun had been within two hours of the Zenith when he drifted away into that deep unconsciousness. It was but two hours from its own resting-place when he awoke, to the rapid alarum of a voluble parrot, whose plumage, as seen through the palm-leaves above him, was a splashing design in cubist planes of scarlet, indigo, and green.
It isn't the first days of isolation, any more than the period immediately following a bereavement, in which the full weight of loneliness is felt, and the boy, on arising, felt strangely refreshed, and yet incomprehensively light of head.
Nor was it so much the hunger and exposure—he was inured to these—as the atmosphere of the place itself. It had a singular clarity—the pristine purity of spring-waters or dews of Eden transmuted into ozone, while still retaining the soft-hued, dream-commingled drowsiness of some potent drug. It was as though this opiate quality which tinctured every breath he drew, every space the eye dwelt on, had been compounded of the myriad hues of the vernal wilder-
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