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By Root 9100 0

the intensity and brilliance that can be found only in the tropics. The entire sky was black with the impending rain except for a narrow ribbon along the horizon. The sun had already disappeared, but its reflection was compressed, channeled into a band of color where the sky met the water. The sunset made an arc along the water like the cove of a harbor, but a strange and illusory harbor, washed in a vivid spectrum of crimson and golden yellows and canary greens. There was a string of tiny clouds shaped like miniature plump sausages and they had become a royal stippled purple. After a time, the men had the impression they were staring at a fabulous island which could have existed only in their imagination. Each detail glowed, became quiveringly real. There was a beach whose sands were polished and golden, and on the false shore a grove of trees had turned a magnificent lavender-blue in the dusk. The beach was separate from everything they had ever known; it possessed every outcropping of rock, every curve of sand dune on a barren and gelid shore, but this beach was alive and quivering with warmth. Above the purple foliage the land rose in pink and violet dales, shading finally into the overcast above the harbor. The water before them, illumined by the sunset, had become the deep clear blue of the sky on a summer evening.

It was a sensual isle, a Biblical land of ruby wines and golden sands and indigo trees. The men stared and stared. The island hovered before them like an Oriental monarch's conception of heaven, and they responded to it with an acute and terrible longing. It was a vision of all the beauty for which they had ever yearned, all the ecstasy they had ever sought. For a few minutes it dissolved the long dreary passage of the mute months in the jungle, without hope, without pride. If they had been alone they might have stretched out their arms to it.

It could not last. Slowly, inevitably, the beach began to dissolve in the encompassing night. The golden sands grew faint, became gray-green, and darkened. The island sank into the water, and the tide of night washed over the rose and lavender hills. After a little while, there was only the gray-black ocean, the darkened sky, and the evil churning of the gray-white wake. Bits of phosphorescence swirled in the foam. The black dead ocean looked like a mirror of the night; it was cold, implicit with dread and death. The men felt it absorb them in a silent pervasive terror. They turned back to their cots, settled down for the night, and shuddered for a long while in their blankets.

It began to rain. The boat churned and pushed through the darkness, wallowing only a hundred yards offshore. Over them all hung the quick fearful anticipation of the patrol ahead. The water washed mournfully against the sides of the boat.

2

The platoon landed early the next morning on the back shore of Anopopei. The rain had halted during the night, and in the dawn the air was fresh and cool, the sunlight pleasant on the beach. The men lolled about on the sand for a few minutes, watching the assault craft back off from shore and start on its return journey. In five minutes the boat was a half mile away, but it seemed like much less, an easy swim across the bright glittering tropic water. The men stared at it wistfully, envying the pilots who by nightfall would return to a safe bivouac and hot food. That's the job to have, Minetta was thinking.

The morning still possessed the new shining quality of a minted coin. The men were thrilled only slightly by the idea that they were on an unexplored shore. The jungle behind them looked essentially familiar; the beach, covered with fine delicate shells, was barren and isolated and would shimmer later in the heat, but now it seemed like every beach upon which they had ever landed. They sprawled about, smoking and laughing, waiting for the patrol to begin, perfectly content for the sun to dry their clothes.

Hearn was feeling a little tense. In a few minutes they would begin a march over forty miles of strange country, the last ten through the Japanese