A JUNGLE BEACH 91 



sky, and a vast expanse of open water lent itself 

 neither to calm appraisal nor to impromptu cuff- 

 notes. 



It was recalled to my mind that the miracle 

 of sunrise occurred every morning, and was not 

 a rather belated alternation of illumination, fol- 

 lowing the quenching of Broadway's lights. And 

 the moon I found was as dependable as when I 

 timed my Himalayan expeditions by her shad- 

 owings. To these phenomena I soon became re- 

 accustomed, and could watch a bird or outwit an 

 insect in the face of a foreglow and silent burst 

 of flame that shamed all the barrages ever laid 

 down. But cosmic happenings kept drawing my 

 attention and paralyzing my activities for long 

 afterward. With a double rainbow and four 

 storms in action at once; or a wall of rain like 

 sawn steel slowly drawing up one river while the 

 Mazaruni remains in full sunlight ; with Pegasus 

 galloping toward the zenith at midnight and the 

 Pleiades just clearing the Penal Settlement, I 

 could not always keep on dissecting, or record- 

 ing, or verifying the erroneousness of one of my 

 recently formed theories. 



There was Thuban, gazing steadily upon my 

 little mahogany bungalow, as, six millenniums 



