“Oh Time, Time, Time!” cried Yoomy—­“it is Time, old midsummer Time, that has made the old world what it is.  Time hoared the old mountains, and balded their old summits, and spread the old prairies, and built the old forests, and molded the old vales.  It is Time that has worn glorious old channels for the glorious old rivers, and rounded the old lakes, and deepened the old sea!  It is Time—­”

“Ay, full time to cease,” cried Media.  “What have you to do with cogitations not in verse, minstrel?  Leave prose to Babbalanja, who is prosy enough.”

“Even so,” said Babbalanja, “Yoomy, you have overstepped your province.  My lord Media well knows, that your business is to make the metal in you jingle in tags, not ring in the ingot.”

CHAPTER XC Rare Sport At Ohonoo

Approached from the northward, Ohonoo, midway cloven down to the sea, one half a level plain; the other, three mountain terraces—­Ohonoo looks like the first steps of a gigantic way to the sun.  And such, if Braid-Beard spoke truth, it had formerly been.

“Ere Mardi was made,” said that true old chronicler, “Vivo, one of the genii, built a ladder of mountains whereby to go up and go down.  And of this ladder, the island of Ohonoo was the base.  But wandering here and there, incognito in a vapor, so much wickedness did Vivo spy out, that in high dudgeon he hurried up his ladder, knocking the mountains from under him as he went.  These here and there fell into the lagoon, forming many isles, now green and luxuriant; which, with those sprouting from seeds dropped by a bird from the moon, comprise all the groups in the reef.”

Surely, oh, surely, if I live till Mardi be forgotten by Mardi, I shall not forget the sight that greeted us, as we drew nigh the shores of this same island of Ohonoo; for was not all Ohonoo bathing in the surf of the sea?

But let the picture be painted.

Where eastward the ocean rolls surging against the outer reef of Mardi, there, facing a flood-gate in the barrier, stands cloven Ohonoo; her plains sloping outward to the sea, her mountains a bulwark behind.  As at Juam, where the wild billows from seaward roll in upon its cliffs; much more at Ohonoo, in billowy battalions charge they hotly into the lagoon, and fall on the isle like an army from the deep.  But charge they never so boldly, and charge they forever, old Ohonoo gallantly throws them back till all before her is one scud and rack.  So charged the bright billows of cuirassiers at Waterloo:  so hurled them off the long line of living walls, whose base was as the sea-beach, wreck-strown, in a gale.

Without the break in the reef wide banks of coral shelve off, creating the bar, where the waves muster for the onset, thundering in water-bolts, that shake the whole reef, till its very spray trembles.  And then is it, that the swimmers of Ohonoo most delight to gambol in the surf.