Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II JAMAICAN DAYS AND NIGHTS MY first sight of Jamaica comes back to me now as fresh and enchanting as on that summer afternoon of 1902 when, straight from England, I stared at it in delight and felt that here one might live for ever in the fullness of romance and wonder. Without an effort) in the mere resting of my thoughts, I see again the distant outline, faint and serrated, hanging between the blues of sky and ocean, I see the vivid islets off Port Royal spring up shining out of the deep, I see Kingston across the bay, green and white upon its tropic shore. We had skirted the island, coming from the west, and it had taken form slowly before my entranced gaze. The sea was calm, with a ripple upon its surface, and inshore the colours flamed and sank upon the shoals like the changing tints of an opal. In that pure and intense air everything stood forth distinct, bright, without a shadow. A sense of lasting repose hung over the land. The very throng upon the quay, gesticulating with raised arms, seemed, for an instant, motionless in the blinding sunshine, as though caught unawares by a magic and fatal spell. In the stillness of that illusion Jamaica rose before me, like a vision from the sea, like a phantom island of eternal rest. But all at once there appeared to break over the scene a shiver of movement. Faint cries resounded from the shore, palms waved, negroes dived into the water, and above the town vultures swept in widening circles. Slowly we pounded up the bay. I saw the blue of the hills melt into a vegetation that topped their summits, and upon the wharf, where Europeans stalked majestically amidst the blacks, every face seemed to detach itselfand stand forth with straining eyes. The steamer trembled as, with reversed propellers, she lashed like a dying whale; then,…
