WORLD’S BLUE SEAS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6442, 24 January 1924, Page 3

WORLD’S BLUE SEAS

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 blue tint seldom seen anywhere button the British coasts, neither blue nor jade green, not “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 and Mediterranean railway may seem crudely exaggerated, but no pigment mixed by mortal hand 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 the 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 shinnig through and lighting up their depths to reveal irridescent gleams of blue and indigo, mauve and deep purple. A wind blovAing with gale force slices up 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 disturb the perpetual summer of Insuline, 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 brass work.

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 us a sea of liquid lapis lazuli. Sometimes it looks as if it has been carved out of one vast solid mass of that gem.