Halcyon Days in the Dream City

by Mrs. D. C. Taylor

Continued from Part 9

We roamed through a cave of the sea;[1] on either side rose lofty pillared arches, thickly broidered and crusted with myriad growths of ocean’s mysterious depths and of its various tributaries. Shells in all their whorls and spirals and intricate convolutions; half sentient sea anemones, sea ferns and broad leaved kelps, branching lace like and weeping willowy corals, arrowy reeds and floating lily pads, wreathed and twined around the columns and arches. Amid these growths sprawled frogs and star fishes, and water snakes drew their slimy lengths amid the twining stems.

Soon we entered a deeper cave. There the light was subdued, shining through dim green depths of water, and darting, floating, rising, falling, sweeping in slow majestic rythm, hiding in rocky nooks, flashing like gold, glowing like scarlet, glooming in dusky greens and browns, scintillating in tints of the rainbow; in every caprice of spot and stripe and clouding were fishes, of every heard and unheard of species, all gazing at us with cold round gold rimmed eyes. Some were hideous creatures all gasping mouth, some were devilish in their spiny cruel sharpness of fin and tail, some were beautiful in their silvery radiance, and some were ugly in their black immensity but one and all, forever slipping, sliding, waving, weaving, ceaselessly through the green glassy water.

By and by we come to a cavern, deeper, loftier yet, cool with the damp of falling water, where high on the domed wall stood spindle-legged herons surrounded by rush grasses, and tiny water birds with thread-like feet and legs, stood on the broad lily-pads and peeped from behind the blossoms. A jet of water rose high in the air and fell murmuring into a deep basin, in which again more fishes swarmed, swayed and floated, and everywhere the strangely silent throngs of human beings, like the fishes wove in and out, and to and fro, rapt in the one satisfied sense of sight.

So we went, round and round this ocean cave, ’till by and by we knew not how, we found ourselves again in the vast vaulted hall of the broidered pillars,[2] and obeying the resistless impulse of the crowding people, found ourselves on solid earth again, and seemed to breathe freer, as if we had risen to the surface.

Continued in Part 11

NOTES

[1] Mrs. Taylor does not name the attraction, which is the beautiful Fisheries Building, designed by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb.

[2] Cobb’s ornate pillars, “embroidered” with repeating patterns of aquatic creatures, are among the design wonders of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition architecture.