“the underwater landscape gradually lit up, and in the shimmering, emerald-green light, illuminated by the sun, there stretched out before me the sandy seabed, on which the gleam from the playful waves created an interweaving pattern of colourful bands of light.
Here and there, individual groups of coral were growing on the stones in the sand, and a reddish shadow in the distance signalled the area where a twenty foot high and five to six foot thick block of Madreporaria rose up from the depths in a fantastic shape”.
Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez, 1867
