Chapter 66

With A Fair Wind, At Sunrise They Sail

True each to his word, up came the sun, and round to my isle came
Media.

How glorious a morning! The new-born clouds all dappled with gold,
and streaked with violet; the sun in high spirits; and the pleasant
air cooled overnight by the blending circumambient fountains, forever
playing all round the reef; the lagoon within, the coral-rimmed
basin, into which they poured, subsiding, hereabouts, into green
tranquillity.

But what monsters of canoes! Would they devour an innocent voyager?
their great black prows curling aloft, and thrown back like trunks of
elephants; a dark, snaky length behind, like the sea-serpent's train.

The prow of the foremost terminated in a large, open, shark's mouth,
garnished with ten rows of pearly human teeth, curiously inserted
into the sculptured wood. The gunwale was ornamented with rows of
rich spotted Leopard and Tiger-shells; here and there, varied by
others, flat and round, and spirally traced; gay serpents petrified
in coils. These were imbedded in a grooved margin, by means of a
resinous compound, exhaling such spices, that the canoes were
odoriferous as the Indian chests of the Maldives.

The likeness of the foremost canoe to an elephant, was helped by a
sort of canopied Howdah in its stern, of heavy, russet-dyed tappa,
tasselled at the corners with long bunches of cocoanut fibres,
stained red. These swayed to and fro, like the fox-tails on a
Tuscarora robe.

But what is this, in the head of the canoe, just under the
shark's mouth? A grinning little imp of an image; a ring in its nose;
cowrie shells jingling at its ears; with an abominable leer, like
that of Silenus reeling on his ass. It was taking its ease; cosily
smoking a pipe; its bowl, a duodecimo edition of the face of the
smoker. This image looked sternward; everlastingly mocking us.

Of these canoes, it may be well to state, that although during our
stay in Odo, so many barges and shallops had touched there, nothing
similar to Media's had been seen. But inquiring whence his sea-
equipage came, we were thereupon taught to reverence the same as
antiquities and heir-looms; claw-keeled, dragon-prowed crafts of a
bygone generation; at present, superseded in general use by the more
swan-like canoes, significant of the advanced stage of marine
architecture in Mardi. No sooner was this known, than what had seemed
almost hideous in my eyes, became merely grotesque. Nor could I help
being greatly delighted with the good old family pride of our host.

The upper corners of our sails displayed the family crest of Media;
three upright boars' tusks, in an heraldic field argent. A fierce
device: Whom rends he?

All things in