The higher they got, the less dense became the trees and the
fewer the cocoa-nut palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and
the few they had here all had their heads bent in the direction of
the lagoon, as if yearning after it.

They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high
whispered together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute
of tree or shrub, led them sharply upward for a hundred feet or so
to where a great rock, the highest point of the island, stood,
casting its shadow in the sunshine. The rock was about twenty
feet high, and easy to climb. Its top was almost flat, and as
spacious as an ordinary dinner-table. From it one could obtain a
complete view of the island and the sea.

Looking down, one's eye travelled over the trembling and waving
tree-tops, to the lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the
reef to the infinite-space of the Pacific. The reef encircled the
whole island, here further from the land, here closer; the song of
the surf on it came as a whisper, just like the whisper you hear in
a shell; but, a strange thing, though the sound heard on the beach
was continuous, up here one could distinguish an intermittency as
breaker after breaker dashed itself to death on the coral strand
below.

You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind,
just so from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage
over the sunlit foliage beneath.

It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-
palm, artu and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry