My Tropic Isle

le

ened to Her infini

ore seldom harsh. Even the mysterious fall of a tree in the jungle - not an unusual occurrence on still days during the wet season - is unaccompanied by thud and shock. Encompassing vines and creepers, colossal in strength and overwhelming in weight, which have strained the

f musk - as soothing as the perfume of violets. The crisp silence of the seashore when absolute calm prevails is as different from the strained, sodden, padded silence of the

yet during the intensest hour of silence any abrupt noise - a call, or whistle, or bark of a dog - finds an immediate response. No sound has been heard for an hour. All the birds have been stricken dumb or have been banished, yet as an echo

lysing my sensations, have I become aware of a hubbub of frail and interblended sounds. That which I had thought to be distilled silence, was microphonic Babel - an intimate commingling of analogous noises varying in quality and intensity. By wilful resistance to what Falstaff called "the disease of not listening," I have been privileged to become aware of the singing of a quiet tune, some of the phrases of which were directly derivative from

made tender by decay, the splash of startled fish in the shadows, commingled and blended to the accompaniment of that subdued aerial buzz by which Nature manifests the more secret of her functions and art - that ineffable minstrelsy to which her sile

bsolute silence has not visited the unea

measure, deaf

usic rolling o

en," attributed the phenomenon to the heat of the sun, the perfect dryness, the deep stillness, "having rendered the ears liable to tingle under the passing touch of some mere memory that may hav

s, though on given planes above its level sounds travel unimpeded for remarkable distances. The resonance of the atmosphere appears at times to be dependent on the tone and quality rather than on the abruptness and loudness of the sound. I have listened with strange delight to the rustle of the sea on the mainland beach - two and a half miles distant - when the

clicks and snaps and snarls - telling of alarms, tragic escapes, and violent death-dealings - blend with the continuous murmur of the sea, and are occasionally punctuated by sudden slaps and thuds as a b

lement of mystery. In a flash unsensational ponderings were displaced by a picture of a steamer in distress far away. Had I not on a similar occasion of a secret-disclosing tide heard through seven miles of insulted and sullen air the flop of an inch or so of dynamite exploded by a heartless barbarian for the illicit destruction of vivacious fish? Had I not listened with amazement to the buzz of a steamer's propeller and the throb o

antwise to the lips of the wind, firm in the branching tines of stag's-horn coral. A rustic pipe - giving forth a sonorous moan, now cooing and crooning, now bold and confident, and again irresolute and unschooled.

prevailed. It was more than a serenade - a primitive sensation from primitive matter - a vital function, for as long, as the wind blew and until the lapping sea gurgled in its throat and its note ceased with the bursting of a bubble, there, held fixedly by living coral, the dead shell could not choose but whistle. So I left it to its wayward p