THE KINGDOM OF THE HELMET JJ 



Just as on the neighboring shores we find such weird 

 creatures as kangaroos, koalas, and emus, so here live the 

 sea-dragon fish, which are to ordinary sea-horses as orchids 

 are to violets, or birds of paradise to house sparrows. They 

 swim about as horizontally as pipefish, are orange and 

 lavender and vermilion, and from every spine sprouts a 

 tuft of floating plumes. I have never seen one alive, but 

 before I die I intend to watch these eerie creatures under 

 water in their native haunts, swimming and feeding and 

 mating among sponges and corals, urchins and waving 

 algse, of colors and shapes far other than those of any 

 animal and vegetable life on land. 



When one is writing about some place seen only by one- 

 self, similes must be resorted to, in order to make vivid 

 the land or water as yet unseen by the reader. The reefs 

 of Haiti are like themselves and nothing else in the world, 

 if even for one thing alone — the forests of stag-horn coral, 

 among whose unbotanical trunks, branches, and twigs one 

 can climb as high as the air-giving hose allows. 



The finest reefs in Bermuda are well to the northward 

 of the islands, beyond the great expanse of boilers and 

 atolls which pepper the ultra-marine with their turquoise 

 shallows. Unless one has crept over or walked around these 

 reefs the description of another person falls pitifully short 

 of the reality. If we desire an image of their beauty and 

 their strangeness, I must demand a mental melange of the 

 moon, a primeval jungle in the youth of the world, and 



