A Womans Journey through the Philippines | Page 3

ice
and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with ornate
chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the
conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes being
eminently scientific and up-to-date. Other people may have had
birthdays en route, for we were away from Manila many weeks, but
none were acknowledged; modesty doubtless constraining those older
than Half-a-Woman from making a too ostentatious display of tell-tale
incandescent lights.
It was a very busy trip, everyone on the ship being occupied, with the
exception of the women who spent most of their time under the cool
blue awning of the quarter-deck, where many a letter was written, and
many a book read aloud and discussed, though more often we
accomplished little, preferring to lie back in our long steamer chairs
and watch the wooded islands with cloud shadows on their shaggy
breasts drift slowly by and fade into the purple distance.

Now we would pass close to some luxuriantly overgrown shore where
tall cocoanut-palms marched in endless procession along the white
beach; now past hills where groups of bamboos swung back and forth
in the warm breeze, and feathery palms and plantains, the sunlight
flickering through their leaves, showed myriad tints of green and gold
and misty gray; these in turn giving place to some volcanic mountain,
bare and desolate. Then for hours there would be no land at all, only the
wonderful horizonless blue of water and sky, the sunlight on the waves
so dazzlingly bright as to hurt the eyes.
But nearly always in this thickly islanded sea there was land, either on
one side or the other, land bearing strange names redolent of tropic
richness, over whose pronunciation we would lazily disagree. Perhaps
it would be but a cliff-bound coast or a group of barren islands in the
distance, bluer even than the skies above them; perhaps some lofty
mountain on whose ridges the white clouds lay like drifted snow; or
perhaps a tier of forest-grown hills, rising one above the other, those
nearest the water clothed in countless shades of green, verging from
deepest olive to the tender tint of newly awakened buds in the
springtime, those farthest away blue or violet against the horizon.
Golden days these were when Time himself grew young again, and,
resting on his scythe, dreamed the sunlit hours away. Until eventide the
summer skies above us slept, as did the summer seas below us, when
both awakened from their slumbers flushed and rosy. On some
evenings the heavy white clouds piled high in the west seemed to catch
fire, the red blaze spreading over the heavens, to be reflected later in
the mirror-like water of the sea. Then the crimson light would gradually
change to amethyst and gold, with the sun hanging like a ball of flame
between heaven and earth, while every conceivable colour, or
combination of colours, played riotously over all in the kaleidoscopic
shifting of the clouds. At last the sun would touch the horizon, sinking
lower and lower into the sea, while the heavens lost their glory, taking
on pale tints of purple and violet. A moment more and the swift
darkness of the tropics would blot out every vestige of colour, for there
is no twilight in the Philippines, no half-tones between the dazzling
tropic sunset and the dusky tropic night.

Then there were other evenings when the colours lying in distinct strata
looked not unlike celestial pousse-cafés, or perhaps some delicately
blended shades of pink and blue and mauve, suggested to a feminine
mind creations of millinery art; or yet again, when a sky that had been
gray and sober all day suddenly blazed out into crimson and gold at
sunset, one was irresistibly reminded of a "Quakeress grown worldly."
And then would come the night and the wonderful starlit heavens of the
tropics--
"--unfathom'd, untrod, Save by even' and morn and the angels of God."
Every star sent a trail of light to the still water, seeming to fasten the
sky to the sea with long silver skewers; wonderful phosphorescence
played about beneath us like wraiths of drowned men luring one to
destruction; while in the musical lap of the water against the ship's side
one almost fancied the sound of Lorelei's singing. And then there were
starless nights with only a red moon to shine through cloudy skies; and
nights no less beautiful when all the world seemed shrouded in black
velvet, when the dusky sea parted silently to let the boat pass through,
and then closed behind it with no laugh or ripple of water to speed it
onward, breathlessly still nights of fathomless darkness. The ship's
master, burdened with visions of coral reefs on a chartless coast, failed
to appreciate the æsthetic beauty of sailing unknown seas in limitless
darkness, and either