green to the
summit, if by any chance the summit should be clear--water-courses here
and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards
afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the
range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous
buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike
the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.

The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of the
Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate. A strong draught of
wind blew day and night over the anchorage. Day and night the same
fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the heavens, the same dusky
cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the mountain. The land-breezes
came very strong and chill, and the sea, like the air, was in perpetual
bustle. The swell crowded into the narrow anchorage like sheep into a
fold; broke all along both sides, high on the one, low on the other;
kept a certain blowhole sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent
itself at last upon the beach.

On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a nursery of
coco-trees. Some were mere infants, none had attained to any size, none
had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-like shaft of the mature
palm. In the young trees the colour alters with the age and growth. Now
all is of a grass-like hue, infinitely dainty; next the rib grows
golden, the fronds remaining green as ferns; and then, as the trunk
continues to mount and to assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on
manlier and more decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the
distance, glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in
the assault of the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku all these hues
and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew
pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a
rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here
and there the stroller had a glimpse of the _Casco_ tossing in the
narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark
amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it
to seaward. The trade-wind moving in the fans made a ceaseless noise of
summer rain; and from time to time, with the sound of a sudden and
distant drum-beat, the surf would burst in a sea-cave.

At the upper end of the inlet, its low, c