YOU asked me to paint you a picture—a picture of a wonderful strand half-circling a space of sunlit sea; an island-studded bay, girt, landwards, by a chain of low blue hills, whose vesture of rich foliage is, through all the years, mirrored in the dazzling waters that bathe those rocky feet. The bay is enclosed between two headlands, both lofty, both rising sheer out of the sea, but that on the north juts out only a little, while the southern promontory is much bolder, and terminates a long strip of land running at right angles to the shore out into very deep water.

The beach between these headlands forms an arc of a circle, and the cord joining its extremities would be about seven miles in length, while following the shore the distance is nearly ten miles.

One might search east or west, the Old World or the New, and find in them few places so attractive as this little-known and sparsely inhabited dent in a far Eastern coast.

Here the sky is nearly always bright; a day which, in its thirteen hours of light, does not give at least half of brilliant, perhaps too brilliant sunshine, is almost unknown. Then it is the sunshine of endless summer, not for a month or a season, but for ever.

Except on rare occasions, the winds from the sea are softest zephyrs, the land breezes are cool and fragrant, sufficient only to stir the leaves of trees and gently ruffle the placid surface of the bay.

The waters of the bay are green—green like a yellow emerald—but in some few places, near the shore, this changes into a warm brown. The beach is a wide stretch of sand broken by rocks of dark umber or Indian red. The sand is, in some places, so startlingly white that the eye can hardly bear the glare of it, while in others it is mixed with fine-broken grains of the ironstone called laterite, and this gives a burnt-sienna colour to the beach. When the tide is high, the great stretches of hard, clean sand are covered with water to a depth of between five and ten feet, and, owing to the absence of mud, mangroves, and mankind, the waters of the bay are of an extraordinary limpidity. The beach in many places dips steeply, so that, at high tide, there are six feet of water within two or three yards of the trees, shrubs, ferns, and creepers that clothe the shore in an abandonment of wild and graceful luxuriance. The sand shines beneath the waters of the sea like powdered diamonds, and all the myriads of pebbles and shells glisten and scintillate, with a fire and life and colour which they lose when the tide falls and leaves the sands dry, but for the little pools that fill the depressions of a generally even surface.

Then, however, is the time to see strange shells moving slowly about, and crabs, of marvellous colour and unexpected instincts, scampering in hundreds over the purple rocks, that here and there make such a striking contrast to the brilliant orange and red, or the startling whiteness of the sand in which they lie half-embedded.

And how positively delightful it is to paddle with bare feet between and over these rounded stones, while the tireless waters make continents and oceans in miniature, and the strange denizens of this life-charged summer sea destroy each other, in the ceaseless struggle to preserve an existence for which they are no more responsible than we are. Here is an army of scarlet-backed crabs, hunting in battalions for something smaller and weaker than its own tiny, fragile units. The spider-like legion, alarmed by the approach of your naked feet, scuttles hurriedly towards a new Red Sea, and, dashing recklessly into the two inches of water, which are running between banks of sandy desert, disappears as completely as Pharaoh and his host. Unlike the Egyptian king, however, the crabs, which have only burrowed into the sand, will presently reappear on the other shore and scour the desert for a morning meal.

And then you are standing amongst the rocks, on a point of a bay within the bay; and, as the rippling wavelets wash over your feet, you peer down into the deeper eddies and pools in search of a sea-anemone. Again, you exclaim in childish admiration of the marvellous colouring of a jelly-fish and his puzzling fashion of locomotion, or your grown-up experience allows you an almost pleasurable little shudder when you think of the poisonous possibilities of this tenderly-tinted, gauzily-gowned digestive system.

The land is not less rich in life than the sea. Nature has fringed the waters with a garden of graceful trees, flowering shrubs, brilliantly blossomed creepers, and slender ferns, far more beautiful in their untrained luxuriance than any effort of human ingenuity could have made them. There are magnolias, sweeping the waters with their magnificent creamy blossoms, made more conspicuous by their background of great, dark green leaves. There are gorgeous yellow alamanders, each blossom as large as a hand; soft pale pink myrtles, star-flowered jasmines, and the delicate wax-plant with its clusters of red or white blossoms. These and a multitude of others, only known by barbarous botanical names, nestle into each other’s arms, interlace their branches, and form arbours of perfumed shade. Close behind stand almond and cashew trees, tree-ferns, coconuts, and sago palms, and then the low hills, clothed with the giants of a virgin forest, that shut out any distant view.

Groups of sandpipers paddle in the little wavelets that lovingly caress the shore; birds of the most gorgeous plumage flit through the jungle with strange cries; and, night and morning, flocks of pigeons, plumed in green and yellow, in orange and brown, flash meteor-like trails of colour, in their rapid flight from mainland to island and back again. The bay is studded with islets, some near, some far, tiny clusters of trees growing out of the water, or a mass of stone, clothed from base to summit with heavy jungle, except for a narrow band of red rocks above the water’s edge.

Sailing in and out the islands, rounding the headlands, or standing across the bay, are boats with white or brown or crimson sails; boats of strange build, with mat or canvas sails of curious design, floating, like tired birds, upon the restful waters of this “changeless summer sea.”

But you remember it all: how we sat under the great blossoms and shining leaves of the magnolias, and, within arm’s length, found treasures of opal-tinted pebbles, and infinite variety of tiny shells, coral-pink and green and heliotrope,—and everything seemed very good indeed.

A mass of dark-red boulders, overlying a bed of umber rock, ran out into the water, closing, as with a protecting arm, one end of the little inlet, while the forest-clad hill, rising sheer from the point, shut out everything beyond. And then the road! bright terra cotta, winding round the bluff through masses of foliage in every shade of green,—giant trees, a maze of undergrowth, and the dew-laden ferns and mosses, blazing with emerald fires under the vagrant shafts of sunlight;—dies cret notanda.

Do you remember how, when the sun had gone, and the soft, fragrant, Eastern night brought an almost tangible darkness, lighted only by the stars, we returned across the bay in a little boat, with two quaintly coloured paper lanterns making a bright spot of colour high above the bow? The only sound to break the measured cadence of the oars was the gentle whisper of the land-wind through the distant palm leaves, and the sighing of the tide as it wooed the passive beach.

And then, as we glided slowly through the starlit darkness, you, by that strange gift of sympathetic intuition, answered my unspoken thought, and sang the Allerseelen, sang it under your breath, “soft and low,” as though it might not reach any ears but ours—yes, that was All Souls’ Day.

There was only the sea and the sky and the stars, only the perfection of aloneness, “Le rÊve de rester ensemble sans dessein.”

And then, all too soon, we came to a space of lesser darkness, visible through the belt of trees which lined the shore; far down that water-lane twinkled a light, the beacon of our landing-place. Do you remember?——