Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/16

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
4
THE ISLE OF SEVEN MOONS

types—vital enough, God knows. In 1910 the last of the riders of the watery plains were still faring forth from Salthaven, but far more had gone down under the white hoofs of their own steeds, or else were drawn up on the beach like battered hulks, useful at best for mere rowboat voyages between house and wharf or the post-office on Preble Square, their cargoes,—a weekly newspaper, a spool of thread. However, for a last port there could have been no more peaceful, no lovelier spot than Salthaven.

To the North, the superb lines of the Lighthouse upspring into the blue; under it, Challenge Rock shatters the league-long, rolling green walls into an eternal snowfall. The landscape to the West, undulating too, back from the rocky shore in sandy billows, is covered with fish-rod-jointed "mare's-tail," and, inland, clumps of cedar, feathery pine, and silver birch, and here and there a solitary hunchback of a house, white and gray against the silver and green. To the South stretches a narrow tongue of land, buff and very barren, and between the two capes, the crescent shoreline and the village,—roofs and chimneys, masts and ropes, a delightful jumble of dark lines, arcs, and angles against the gold and blue of a summer sky.

But the great half of the picture always to the East—tumbling, tossing, wallowing, shambling, raging, sleeping, thundering, whispering; blue or gray or green, all gold or black infinitely lipped with white—the vast, multitudinously-mooded chameleon of an ocean.

Just a mile and a half from the foot of Challenge Rock, the visitor, skirting the crescent of the smoother shore-line,