desolate islands, shaped like the letters of an Oriental alphabet,—those reaches of flesh-colored sand, that shift their shape with the years, but never cease to grow.
Miles of sluggish, laboring travel,—sometimes over shallows of less than half a fathom,—through archipelagoes whose islets become more and more widely separated as we proceed. Then the water deepens steadily,—and the sky also seems to deepen,—and there is something in the bright air that makes electrical commotion in the blood and fills the lungs with richer life. Gulls with white breasts and dark, broad wings sweep past with sharp, plaintive cries; brown clouds of pelicans hover above tiny islands within rifle-shot,—alternately rising and descending all together. Through luminous distances the eye can just distinguish masses of foliage, madder-colored by remoteness, that seem to float in suspension between the brightness of the horizon and the brightness of water, like shapes of the Fata Morgana. And in those far, dim, island groves prevails, perhaps, the strange belief that the Universe itself is but a mirage; for the gods of the most eastern East have been transported
