There were no rocks to
look out for, no shoals in what was really one vast shoal, and all was
smooth as milk. All the afternoon, till the sun set and the stars came
out and we dropped our anchor in a luminous nothingness, a child could
have navigated us; but, when the next day brought us up to the northwest
corner of Andros, we found ourselves face to face with a variety of
difficulties: glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches
of half-made land with pines struggling knee-deep in the tide; here and
there a mile of mangroves, and delusive channels of blue water; beauty
everywhere spreading out her sweeping laces of foam--a welter of a world
still in its making, with no clear passages for any craft drawing more
than a canoe. Loveliness everywhere--again the waving purple fans, and
the heraldic fish, and the branching coral mysteriously making the
world. Loveliness everywhere!--in fact a labyrinth of beauty with no way
out.

And the captain, like nearly every captain I have met in the Bahamas,
knew as little about it as I did. Charlie had been right; you must know
how to sail your own boat when you hoist your sails in Bahaman waters. I
confess that I began to regret Charlie's preoccupation with Tobias--for,
in spite of his missing his way that day in the North Bight, Charlie
seems to know his way in the dark wherever one happens to be on the sea.

However, there was really nothing to worry us. There was no wind. The
weather was calm, and there was lots of time. At last, after studying
the chart and talking it over with Tom, who though he had only shipped
as cook, was the best sailor on board, we decided to run north, and take
a channel described on the chart as "very intricate."

At last we came to a little foam-fringed cay, where it was conceivable
that the shyest and rarest of shells would choose to make its home--a
tiny aristocrat, driven out of the broad tideways by the coarser
ambitions and the ruder strength of great molluscs that feed and grow
fat and house themselves in crude convolutions of uncouthly striving
horn; a little lonely shore, kissed with the white innocence of the sea,
where pearls might secretly make themselves perfect, untroubled by the
great doings of wind and tide--merely rocked into beauty by ripple and
beam, with a teardrop falling, once in a while, into their dim growing
hearts, from some wavering distant star.

It was impossible to imagine a cay better answering to my conch