CHAPTER XX 



FAREWELL, Ponta Delgada, with your pretty streets 

 perfumed with fir planks and pine-apples ; farewell, 

 San Miguel. How sweetly the delicate tints of your 

 capital pale pink and blue show in this early sunlight. 



Your great clock on the white campanile marks six A.M. 

 and the sunlight glitters already on the blue tiles above the 

 arches of the inner harbour. That is the place for an artist 

 who would paint in highest toned water-colours flowers, 

 fruit, wine skins, white walls, and blue sea. I will grant you 

 all this, San Miguel, but there's a grim side to your island 

 cliffs and a lee- shore on a black night, and I seem to recall 

 a wreck and rockets, distress signals all a fraud, and then 

 there are those moonlike craters, your beauty spots. You 

 and the Inferno, Saint Michael, seem to be somewhat neigh- 

 bourly. And your people we recall, how kind to the stranger, 

 a few of them, dark-haired girls in white dresses on green 

 balconies seemed pretty enough, but in the country how 

 close they seem to the soil, worn and aged, one good-looking 

 among a thousand sad women, one pretty child in thread- 

 bare rags healthy, amongst so many who looked pinched and 

 hungry. 



No, we do not drop tears at leaving you ; but think hope- 

 fully of Madeira and Funchal to the S.E., where we may 

 meet white people of our own race, and where I have seen 

 whales ; and perhaps we may have a day or two in the 

 boats, off shore twenty miles, in the heat and blue rollers, 

 fishing for tunny. A two-hundred-pounder, with the hard line 

 cutting grooves in the gunwale as it whizzes into the depths, 

 is good hunting. 



I pen this farewell to the island in my bunk, looking out 

 at the port, determined not to go on deck and see any more 

 departures that hurried one in the night watches to save 

 a wreck was quite satisfying, so " we " doze and let the 



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