whether we made Iloilo in twelve hours. I do remember the night trip
down the east coast of Panay, with Negros on the invisible left,
and all about us a chain of little islands where the fisher folk
were engaged in their night work of spearing fish by torchlight. Dim
mountainous shapes would rise out of the sea and loom vaguely in the
starlit distance, the curving beaches at their bases outlined by the
torches in the bancas till they looked like boulevards with their lines
of flickering lamps. I remember that we fell to singing, and that after
we had sung everything we knew, an officer of the First Infantry who
was going back to his regiment after a wound and a siege in hospital
said enthusiastically: "Oh, don't stop. You don't know how it sounds
to hear a whole lot of American men and women singing together."

It was somewhere between ten and midnight when a light flashed ahead,
and beyond it lay a little maze of twinkles that they said was
Iloilo. The anchor chains ran out with a clang and rattle, for our
Spanish captain took no chances, and would not pick his way through
the Siete Pecadores at night.

The Siete Pecadores, or Seven Sinners, are a group of islands, or
rocks--for they amount to little more than that--some six miles north
of Iloilo, just at the head of Guimaras Strait. On the east the long,
narrow island of Guimaras, hilly and beautifully wooded, lies like
a wedge between Panay and Negros. Beyond it the seven-thousand-foot
volcano, Canlaon, on Negros, lifts a purple head. On the west lies the
swampy foreshore of Panay with a mountain range inland, daring the
sunlight with scarpy flanks, on which every ravine and every cleft
are sunk in shadows of violet and pink. The water of the straits is
glassy and full of jelly-fish, some of the white dome-like kind, but
more of the purple ones that float on the water like a petalled flower.