Charmian reached out her hand and clung to me--for support against the ineffable beauty of it, thought I.But no.As I supported her I braced my legs, while the flowers and lawns reeled and swung around me.It was like an earthquake, only it quickly passed without doing any harm.It was fairly difficult to catch the land playing these tricks.As long as I kept my mind on it, nothing happened.But as soon as my attention was distracted, away it went, the whole panorama, swinging and heaving and tilting at all sorts of angles.Once, however, I turned my head suddenly and caught that stately line of royal palms swinging in a great arc across the sky.
But it stopped, just as soon as I caught it, and became a placid dream again.
Next we came to a house of coolness, with great sweeping veranda, where lotus-eaters might dwell.Windows and doors were wide open to the breeze, and the songs and fragrances blew lazily in and out.
The walls were hung with tapa-cloths.Couches with grass-woven covers invited everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played, I was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies.Servants--Japanese maids in native costume--drifted around and about, noiselessly, like butterflies.Everything was preternaturally cool.
Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea.
It was too good to be true.But it was not real.It was a dream-dwelling.I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious corner of the room.I did not say anything, for just then we were being received by a gracious woman, a beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod with sandals, who greeted us as though she had known us always.
We sat at table on the lotus-eating veranda, served by the butterfly maids, and ate strange foods and partook of a nectar called poi.
But the dream threatened to dissolve.It shimmered and trembled like an iridescent bubble about to break.I was just glancing out at the green grass and stately trees and blossoms of hibiscus, when suddenly I felt the table move.The table, and the Madonna across from me, and the veranda of the lotus-eaters, the scarlet hibiscus, the greensward and the trees--all lifted and tilted before my eyes, and heaved and sank down into the trough of a monstrous sea.Igripped my chair convulsively and held on.I had a feeling that Iwas holding on to the dream as well as the chair.I should not have been surprised had the sea rushed in and drowned all that fairyland and had I found myself at the wheel of the Snark just looking up casually from the study of logarithms.But the dream persisted.Ilooked covertly at the Madonna and her husband.They evidenced no perturbation.The dishes had not moved upon the table.The hibiscus and trees and grass were still there.Nothing had changed.
I partook of more nectar, and the dream was more real than ever.
"Will you have some iced tea?" asked the Madonna; and then her side of the table sank down gently and I said yes to her at an angle of forty-five degrees.
"Speaking of sharks," said her husband, "up at Niihau there was a man--" And at that moment the table lifted and heaved, and I gazed upward at him at an angle of forty-five degrees.
So the luncheon went on, and I was glad that I did not have to bear the affliction of watching Charmian walk.Suddenly, however, a mysterious word of fear broke from the lips of the lotus-eaters.
"Ah, ah," thought I, "now the dream goes glimmering." I clutched the chair desperately, resolved to drag back to the reality of the Snark some tangible vestige of this lotus land.I felt the whole dream lurching and pulling to be gone.Just then the mysterious word of fear was repeated.It sounded like REPORTERS.I looked and saw three of them coming across the lawn.Oh, blessed reporters!
Then the dream was indisputably real after all.I glanced out across the shining water and saw the Snark at anchor, and Iremembered that I had sailed in her from San Francisco to Hawaii, and that this was Pearl Harbour, and that even then I was acknowledging introductions and saying, in reply to the first question, "Yes, we had delightful weather all the way down."