space to another world.

Yet all around us there was life--life in a thousand varying forms,
filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves
were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground
of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed
ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human
creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a
universe filled with pulsing, sentient life clothed in such
multitudinous forms, man learns humility. He shrinks to a speck on
an illimitable ocean.

I spent long afternoons lying on the cabin-house, watching the
frigates, the tropics, gulls, boobys, and other sea-birds that
sported through the sky in great numbers. The frigate-birds were
called by the sailors the man-of-war bird, and also the sea-hawk.
They are marvelous flyers, owing to the size of the pectoral muscles,
which compared with those of other birds are extraordinarily large.
They cannot rest on the water, but must sustain their flights from
land to land, yet here they were in mid-ocean.

[Illustration: The ironbound coast of the Marquesas]

[Illustration: A road in Nuka-Hiva]

My eyes would follow one higher and higher till he became a mere dot
in the blue, though but a few minutes earlier he had risen from his
pursuit of fish in the water. He spread his wings fully and did not
move them as he climbed from air-level to air-level, but his long
forked tail expanded and closed continuously.