—he almost feared it but now that the building of the hut, the manufacture of his weapons, and the stocking of his larder, had secured shelter and sustenance, he was resolved to conquer that dread. So, immediately after the house-warming, he started a tour of exploration, noting his discoveries on a rough chart made of bark from the widest girthed tree he could strip. Some human habitation he might find, although he doubted that, and perhaps the charting of the place in actual visual lines would give tangible form to its haunting vagueness, dispel the mystery, which for all its loveliness he felt to be unholy and ominous.
"The Two Horns," as he called the capes encircling the bay, he first traced on the map. Then because of the many hues shimmering in the waters between them, he carved the letters "Rainbow Bay," although he was tempted to change the name to one more fanciful when he gazed down through the pellucid depths at the odd sea forms and quaint sea fauna, lying still at the bottom or crawling lumberingly away.
Little sea-horses like animated chessmen floated through the waters, their heads held high, and seemingly propelled by no motive power but the buoyancy of their own mettle; and grotesque toad-fish; and warted creatures; and ludicrously misshapen things with toothed claws of vermilion; and angel-fish with mouths whose hideousness was swathed in scarflike fins of an infinitely delicate hue and texture. Each tint a poem; each fin a flame that water could not quench; each claw a most prodigious joke! The little jokes of God, as he had once told Sally—so long ago it seemed.
