WORLD'S BLUE SEAS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

WORLD'S BLUE SEAS

AZURE BEAUTIES OF THE

PACIFIC.

From a verandah facing the Channel the sea looks very beautiful (writes "A Returned Exile " in the London "Evening News"). After a dull and showery morning the sun has come out again; the water is still very clear, and of that indescribable pale tint seldom seen anywhere' but on the British coastß, neither blue nor jade green, nor "eau de nil," very cool and, restful to the eye of a wanderer home from the Tropics. Memory recalls visions of distant seas in other climes, and comparisons are inevitable. Many of us have delighted in the beauty of the Azure Coast. To one used to the colder colouring of northerly latitudes, the posters of the Paris, Lyons, arid Mediterranean railway may seem crudely exaggerated, but no pigments mixed by mortal hands can convey more than a dim idea of the reality. Of all artists the marine painter must feel most his hopeless inadequacy. The Indian Ocean can be as vividly blue, but is perhaps most beautiful in tfte season of the monsoon. Often the sky is overcast with black clouds, but when they clear away nothing can exceed the loveliness of those walls of green water, towering at times high above the poop, as they roll up from the south-east, with the morning sun shining through and lighting up their depths to reveal iridescent gleams of blue and indigo, mauve, and deep purple. A wind blowing with gale force slices off the white horses as with a knife-blade, and the flying spindrift scatters ever shifting fragments of rainbow to-brighten the dark hollows. And then the wonderful seas that lie between Singapore and the islands of the Dutch Indies! Few storms 1-disturb the perpetual summer of Insulin.de, and it is a dazzling vision of vivid colour that the traveller looks on from "the spacious palm court of the mail steamer Melchior Treub, like a yacht for smartness, with her snowy decks and gleaming brasswork.

But perhaps the deepest and most gorgeous blue of all is to be found in the ocean that washes the eastern shores of Australia. Far away to starboard, as we follow the long coast line between Thursday Island and Brisbane, lies a desolate waste of sand and rock, and bare brown mountains; around ug a sea of liquid lapis lazuli. Sometimes it looks as if it had 'been carved out of one vast solid mass of that gem.