The ice, which was packed in boxes of sawdust on deck, afforded one cold drink in which to toast the gallant future governor, and that was the last of it.  At night the Tahitian sailors helped themselves, and we bade farewell to ice until once more we saw Papeite.

It was no refreshment to reflect that had we dredging apparatus long enough we could procure from the sea-bottom buckets of ooze that would have cooled our drinks almost to the freezing point.  Scientists have done this.  Lying Bill was loth to believe the story and the explanation, that an icy stream flows from the Antarctic through a deep valley in the sea-depths.

“It’s contrar-iry to nature,” he affirmed.  “The depper you go the ’otter it is.  In mines the ’eat is worse the farther down.  And ’ow about ’ell?”

I slept on the deck.  It was sickeningly hot below.  The squalls had passed, and as we neared Hiva-oa the sea became glassy smooth, but the leagues-long, lazy roll of it rocked the schooner like a cradle.

The night before the islands were to come into view the sea was lit by phosphorescence so magnificently that even my shipmates, absorbed in ecarte below, called to one another to view it.  The engine took us along at about six knots, and every gentle wave that broke was a lamp of loveliness.  The wake of the Morning Star was a milky path lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface, beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion sparks of fire shot to the air.  Far behind, until the horizon closed upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the dim distance, but sparkling still.

I went forward and stood by the cathead.  The blue water stirred by the bow was wonderfully bright, a mass of coruscating phosphorescence that lighted the prow like a lamp.  It was as if lightning played beneath the waves, so luminous, so scintillating the water and its reflection upon the ship.

The living organisms of the sea were en fete that night, as though to celebrate my coming to the islands of which I had so long dreamed.  I smiled at the fancy, well knowing that the minute pyrocistis, having come to the surface during the calm that followed the storms, were showing in that glorious fire the panic caused among them by the cataclysm of our passing.  But the individual is ever an egoist.  It seems to man that the universe is a circle about him and his affairs.  It may as well seem the same to the pyrocistis.

Far about the ship the waves twinkled in green fire, disturbed even by the ruffling breeze.  I drew up a bucketful of the water.  In the darkness of the cabin it gave no light until I passed my hand through it.  That was like opening a door into a room flooded by electricity; the table, the edges of the bunks, the uninterested faces of my shipmates, leaped from the shadows.  Marvels do not seem marvelous to men to live among them.