"Nearer the surface are scores and scores of splendid medusæ or jelly-fishes; under their waving limbs glint and radiate rubies, emeralds and sapphires. On this brightest day of tropical sunshine they float lazily along with the tide, but they are perilously near to the shore, and hundreds will be stranded on the beach. Many a little azure nautilus or 'Portuguese man o' war' sails hither and thither on the gently-heaving waves.
"Seawards, if we look, the ocean's breast is flecked and patched with tender graze greens and with opal tints, but towards the horizon it is as blue as the sky itself. Landwards, in long white lines, the breakers roll in on the snow-white sands that are at present all but deserted by both negro and Somali, who will sleep in the shadows till the sun sinks lower and lower and kisses the sea good-night. Yonder are the silvery house-blocks of Zanzibar, but the flags on the various consulates droop listlessly roofwards, and our own white ensign is almost trailing in the waters astern."
Kep closes the book, closes his eyes, too, but he is not going to sleep, but only just to day-dream, and his long brown fingers keeps the place for him.
There is the thunder of waves beneath the cliffs leaping lion-like on the black and weed-trailed rocks; there is the scream of the British sea-mew too, and the long lorn wail of many another sea-bird that floats all day 'twixt sky and sea. They are all the boy's friends and favourites, and when at morn or noon he dashes into the water and breasts the billows far off the shore, they fly friendly around his head, or float so white and near he might almost touch their paddling feet.
Yes, and all things of the ocean that he has ever seen or read about appeal to Kep. Realities, I mean. He thinks himself a man, and would be ashamed to recite "The boy stood on the burning deck." That was sheer nonsense. Why could he not have leapt into the blue bosom of kindly Mother Ocean? That is what Kep would have done. Some of the folk lore of the sea, however, still enamoured him. He wanted to believe, or liked to believe, there were real mermaids and sirens also, that sung by night on the rocks of fairy islands to lure the unsuspecting mariners to their doom.