The moon is failing,
    A petal sailing
      Down in the west
      That bends o’er thee;
    And the stars are hiding,
    As we go gliding
      Back to the nest,
      Ah! back to thee.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

In Which We Gather Shells—­and Other Matters.

With Charlie gone, and duck-shooting not being one of my passions, there was nothing to detain me in Andros.  So we were soon under way, out of the river, and heading north up the western shore of the big monotonous island.  We had some fifty miles to make before we reached its northern extremity—­and, all the way, we seldom had more than two fathoms of water, and the coast was the same interminable line of mangroves and thatch palms, with occasional clumps of pine trees, and here and there the mouth of a creek, leading into duck-haunted swamps.

It was evident that the island kept its head above water with difficulty, and that the course we were running over was all the time aspiring to be dry land, right away from the coast to the Florida channel.  For miles west and north, it would have been impossible to find more than three fathoms.  As I said of the east coast, inside the reef, it was a vast swimming bath, but of greater dimensions, a swimming bath with a floor of alabaster, and water that seemed to be made of dissolved moonstones.

For a while, our going seemed very much as though we were sailing a big toy-boat in an illimitable porcelain bathtub.  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.