the island of far in the sky the trade wind clouds drift low over the blue green of the deep sea nearer the sea is and light olive green then comes the where the water is all purple with red still nearer are brighter and lying in alternate and showing where lie between the living coral banks through and over and out of these wonderful colors and a magnificent surf as say i lift my eyes to all this and through the white crest of a suddenly appears dark figure erect a man fish or a sea god on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down driving in toward shore finding one s way about buried to his in smoking spray caught up by the sea and flung bodily a quarter of a mile it is a on a surf board and i know that when i have finished these lines i shall be out in that riot of color and surf trying to bit those even as he and failing as he never failed but living life as the best of us may live it and the picture of that colored sea and that flying sea god becomes another reason for the young man to go west and farther west beyond the of sunset and still west till he arrives home again but to return please do not think that i already know it all i know only the of there lis a vast deal yet for me to learn on the there is a score of fascinating books on waiting for me there is the danger angle of there is the line of which when you know least of all where you are shows most where you are and where you are not there are and of methods of finding one s on the deep and one can work years before he masters it all in all its even in the little we did learn there were slips that accounted for the apparently behavior of the on thursday may for instance the trade wind failed us during the twenty four hours that ended friday at noon by dead reckoning we had not sailed twenty miles yet here are our positions at noon for the two days worked out from our observations thursday � n � w friday � n � w o the of the the difference between the two positions was something like eighty miles yet we knew we had not travelled twenty miles now our was all right we went over it several times what was wrong was the observations we had taken to take a correct observation requires practice and skill and especially so on a small craft like the the violently moving boat and the of the observer s eye to the surface of the water are to blame a big wave that lifts up a mile off is liable to steal the horizon away but in our particular case there was another the sun in its annual march north through the heavens was increasing its on the th parallel of north latitude in the middle of may the sun is nearly overhead the angle of arc was between eighty eight and eighty nine degrees had it been ninety degrees it would have been straight overhead it was on another day that we learned a few things about taking the of the almost perpendicular sun started in drawing the sun down to the eastern horizon and he stayed by that point of the compass despite the fact that the sun would pass the to the south i on the other hand started in to draw the sun down to and strayed away to the you see we were teaching ourselves as a result at twenty five minutes past twelve by the ship s time i called twelve o clock by the sun now this signified that we had changed our on the face of the world by twenty five minutes which was equal to something like six degrees of or three hundred and fifty miles this showed the had travelled fifteen knots per hour finding one s way about i for twenty four hours � and we had never noticed it it was absurd and grotesque but still looking east that it was not yet twelve o clock he was bent on giving us a then we began to train our rather wildly all around the horizon and wherever we looked there was the sun close to the sky line a big wave thai is liable to steal the horizon away sometimes above it and sometimes below it in one direction the sun was morning in another direction it was afternoon the sun was all right � we knew that therefore we were all wrong and the rest of the afternoon we spent in the reading up the matter in the books and finding out what was wrong we missed the observation that day but we didn t the next we had learned and we learned well better than for a while we thought we had at the beginning of the second dog the of the watch one evening and i sat down on the head for a rubber of to glance ahead i saw cloud mountains rising from the sea we were rejoiced at the sight of land but i was in despair over our i thought we had learned something yet our position at noon what we had run since did not put us within a hundred miles of land but there was the land fading away before our eyes in the fires of sunset the land was all right there was no it therefore our was all wrong but it wasn t that land we saw was the summit of the house of the sun the greatest extinct in the world it ten thousand feet above the sea and it was all of a 