The young
Indian, yielding at once to love and superstition, seemed half-melting
in his embrace, when, in a moment, she uttered a wild shriek, repelled
him with all her strength, and crouched in an uncouth posture of fear,
while she pointed with one quivering hand to a figure that appeared, at
that moment, in the perspective of that tumultuous and indefinite heap
of stone. The lover, unalarmed by the shriek of his mistress, was
advancing to catch her in his arms, when his eye fell on the object that
had struck hers, and he sunk on his face to the earth, in mute
adoration. “The form was that of a female, but such as they had never before
beheld, for her skin was perfectly white, (at least in their eyes, who
had never seen any but the dark-red tint of the natives of the Bengalese
islands). Her drapery (as well as they could see) consisted only of
flowers, whose rich colours and fantastic grouping harmonized well with
the peacock’s feathers twined among them, and altogether composed a
feathery fan of wild drapery, which, in truth, beseemed an “island
goddess.” Her long hair, of a colour they had never beheld before, pale
auburn, flowed to her feet, and was fantastically entwined with the
flowers and the feathers that formed her dress. On her head was a
coronal of shells, of hue and lustre unknown except in the Indian
seas--the purple and the green vied with the amethyst, and the emerald. On her white bare shoulder a loxia was perched, and round her neck was
hung a string of their pearl--like eggs, so pure and pellucid, that the
first sovereign in Europe might have exchanged her richest necklace of
pearls for them. Her arms and feet were perfectly bare, and her step had
a goddess-like rapidity and lightness, that affected the imagination of
the Indians as much as the extraordinary colour of her skin and hair. The young lovers sunk in awe before this vision as it passed before
their eyes. While they prostrated themselves, a delicious sound trembled
on their ears. The beautiful vision spoke to them, but it was in a
language they did not understand; and this confirming their belief that
it was the language of the gods, they prostrated themselves to her
again. At that moment, the loxia, springing from her shoulder, came
fluttering towards them. “He is going to seek for fire-flies to light
his cell(11),” said the Indians to each other. But the bird, who, with
an intelligence peculiar to his species, understood and adopted the
predilection of the fair being he belonged to, for the fresh flowers in
which he saw her arrayed every day, darted at the withered rose-bud in
the wreath of the young Indian; and, striking his slender beak through
it, laid it at her feet. The omen was interpreted auspiciously by the
lovers, and, bending once more to the earth, they rowed back to their
island, but no longer in separate canoes. The lover steered that of his
mistress, while she sat beside him in silence; and the young people who
accompanied them chaunted verses in praise of the _white_ goddess, and
the island sacred to her and to lovers. (11) From the fire-flies being so often found in the nest of the
  loxia, the Indians imagine he illuminates his nest with them. It is
  more likely they are the food of his young. CHAPTER XV. But tell me to what saint, I pray,
      What martyr, or what angel bright,
    Is dedicate this holy day,
      Which brings you here so gaily dight? Dost thou not, simple Palmer, know,
      What every child can tell thee here?--
    Nor saint nor angel claims this show,
      But the bright season of the year. QUEEN-HOO HALL, BY STRUTT. “The sole and beautiful inmate of the isle, though disturbed at the
appearance of her worshippers, soon recovered her tranquillity. She
could not be conscious of fear, for nothing of that world in which she
lived had ever borne a hostile appearance to her. The sun and the
shade--the flowers and foliage--the tamarinds and figs that prolonged
her delightful existence--the water that she drank, wondering at the
beautiful being who seemed to drink whenever she did--the peacocks, who
spread out their rich and radiant plumage the moment they beheld
her--and the loxia, who perched on her shoulder and hand as she walked,
and answered her sweet voice with imitative chirpings--all these were
her friends, and she knew none but these. “The human forms that sometimes approached the island, caused her a
slight emotion; but it was rather that of curiosity than alarm; and
their gestures were so expressive of reverence and mildness, their
offerings of flowers, in which she delighted, so acceptable, and their
visits so silent and peaceful, that she saw them without reluctance, and
only wondered, as they rowed away, how they could move on the water in
safety; and how creatures so dark, and with features so unattractive,
happened to _grow_ amid the beautiful flowers they presented to her as
the productions of their abode. The elements might be supposed to have
impressed her imagination with some terrible ideas; but the periodical
regularity of these phænomena, in the climate she inhabited, divested
them of their terrors to one who had been accustomed to them, as to the
alternation of night and day--who could not remember the fearful
impression of the first, and, above all, who had never heard any terror
of them expressed _by another_,--perhaps the primitive cause of fear in
most minds. Pain she had never felt--of death she had no idea--how,
then, could she become acquainted with fear? “When a north-wester, as it is termed, visited the island, with all its
terrific accompaniments of midnight darkness, clouds of suffocating
dust, and thunders like the trumpet of doom, she stood amid the leafy
colonnades of the banyan-tree, ignorant of her danger, watching the
cowering wings and drooping heads of the birds, and the ludicrous terror
of the monkies, as they skipt from branch to branch with their young. When the lightning struck a tree, she gazed as a child would on a
fire-work played off for its amusement; but the next day she wept, when
she saw the leaves would no longer grow on the blasted trunk. When the
rains descended in torrents, the ruins of the pagoda afforded her a
shelter; and she sat listening to the rushing of the mighty waters, and
the murmurs of the troubled deep, till her soul took its colour from the
sombrous and magnificent imagery around her, and she believed herself
precipitated to earth with the deluge--borne downward, like a leaf, by a
cataract--engulphed in the depths of the ocean--rising again to light on
the swell of the enormous billows, as if she were heaved on the back of
a whale--deafened with the roar--giddy with the rush--till terror and
delight embraced in that fearful exercise of imagination. So she lived
like a flower amid sun and storm, blooming in the light, and bending to
the shower, and drawing the elements of her sweet and wild existence
from both.