There was abundant vegetation upon the island, but it does not appear to have looked quite real.  The fig-trees were heavy with fruit, the vines were festooned from bough to bough, hung with clusters of grapes, and pomegranates were ripe for the plucking.  But there seems to have been an unearthliness about them, as though a deep enchantment were upon them.  In the tangled undergrowth through which the bewildered sailor walked there lay great melons and pumpkins.  The breeze wafted to his nostrils the smell of the incense-trees; and the scent of the flowers, after the storm, must have made every breath he breathed a pleasure of Paradise to him.  Moving over the luxuriant ground, he put up flights of wonderful birds which sped towards the interior, red, green, and golden, against the sky.  Monkeys chattered at him from the trees, and sprang from branch to branch amidst the dancing flowers.  In shadowed pools of clear water fishes were to be seen, gliding amidst the reeds; and amongst the rocks beside the sea the castaway could look down upon the creatures of the deep imprisoned between the tides.

Food in all forms was to hand, and he had but to fill his arms with the good things which Fate had provided.  “I found there,” he said, “figs, grapes, and all manner of goodly onions; melons and pomegranates were there, and pumpkins of every kind.  Fishes were there and fowls:  there was nought that was lacking in it.  I satisfied myself, and set upon the ground the abundance of that with which my arms were filled.  I took the fire-borer and kindled a fire, and made a burnt-offering to the gods.”

Seated in the warm sunshine amidst the trees, eating a roast fowl seasoned with onions or some equally palatable concoction, he seems to have found the life of a shipwrecked mariner by no means as distressing as he had anticipated; and the wording of the narrative appears to be so arranged that an impression of comfortable ease and security may surround his sunlit figure.  Suddenly, however, all was changed.  “I heard,” said he, “a sound as of thunder, and I thought it was the waves of the sea.”  Then “the trees creaked and the earth trembled”; and, like the Egyptian that he was, he went down on his shaking hands and knees, and buried his face in the ground.

At length “I uncovered my face,” he declared, “and I found it was a serpent that came, of the length of thirty cubits”—­about fifty feet—­“and his tail was more than two cubits” in diameter.  “His skin was overlaid with gold, and his eyebrows were of real lapis lazuli, and he was exceeding perfect.”

“He opened his mouth to me,” he continued, “as I lay on my stomach before him, and said to me:  ’Who brought thee, who brought thee, little one?—­who brought thee?  If thou delayest to tell me who brought thee to this island I will cause thee to know thyself (again only) when thou art ashes, and art become that which is not seen’”—­that is to say, a ghost.