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 écarté 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_.