of the shore broke loose and drifted away, each island a floating jungle filled with beasts and birds, to some remote, unseen part of the greenish, yellow sea. One could watch them in the distance, fantastic, unreal ships, alive like the shore with ibis and wild ducks, herons and the rosy paradisical flamingoes whose color sometimes touched the borders of the lake with the glory of the sunrise.
It was here in this world that Philip, with an aching head and a body raw with the bites of insects, found the first glow of that romance with which Naomi, despite her poverty of words, her clumsiness of expression and her unseeing eyes, had managed to invest all Africa. In the beginning, during those first terrible nights, Philip felt the unearthly beauty of the place was dimmed by a kind of horror that seemed to touch all the primeval world about him. It excited him but it also roused an odd, indescribable loathing. It seemed naked, cruel and too opulent. But in the beginning there had been no time to ponder in morbidity over such things; there was only time for work, endless work—the chopping away of the stubborn vines and saplings, the strengthening of roofs, the filling-in of gaps in the stockade against thieving natives and prowling animals. For him the work beneath the blazing sun was a ceaseless agony; he had not the slow, oxlike patience nor the clumsy, skillful carpenter's hands of Swanson. There was only work, work, work, with no prospect of conquering the heat, the rains and the horrible vegetation which, possessed of an animal intelligence, sprang up alive where it had been slaughtered only the day before. It seemed to him in moments of blank discouragement that all which remained
