366 MYSTIC ISLES 



ily, I paddled to the reef with never-failing expectation 

 of new w^onders. The marine life of the Tahiti reef is 

 richer than anywhere in these seas, as the soil of the is- 

 land is more bountiful. 



At that state of the tide the surf barely broke upon 

 the reef, and, almost uncovered, its treasures were ex- 

 posed for a little while as if especially for me. The reef 

 itself was a marvel of contrivance by the blind animals 

 which had died to raise it. If I had been brought to it 

 hooded, and known nothing of such phenomena, I would 

 have sworn it was an old concrete levee. The top was 

 about fifty feet wide, as level as a floor, pitted with in- 

 numerable holes, the hiding-places of millions of living 

 forms which fed on one another, and were continually 

 replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef 

 opposed to the sea was a rough slope from the summit 

 to the bottom, buttressed against the attacks of storms, 

 and defended by chevaux-de-frise such as the Americans 

 sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured cau- 

 tiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics 

 would have found there all the old defenses in coral — 

 caltrops, and abatis, molded in dark-gray coral, bat- 

 tered and shot-marked. It was a dream of a sunken 

 city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of 

 the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, di- 

 recting the destruction, by his burning-glass, of the 

 enemy's ships. The side of the reef toward the land was 

 as sheer as an engineer could make it with a plumb-line. 

 The coral animals had as accurate a measure of the ver- 

 tical as of defense against the ocean. 



Over this levee rolled or slid a dozen kinds of shellfish 

 spying out refuges against the breakers and their brother 



