Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila by following Palawan’s beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this. Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China Sea. When you’re down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle across the waves, it probably doesn’t look like much, but from up here you can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming-pool blue before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock’s plume.