A Womans Journey through the Philippines | Page 3

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 ?sthetic beauty of sailing unknown seas in limitless darkness, and either anchored on such nights, or paced back and forth upon his bridge, longing for electric lighted heavens that would not play him such scurvy tricks.
And there were gray days, too, which only served to make more golden the sun-kissed ones; days when no observations could be