of a thousand-foot chasm! If there's men on
the island, we shall know that soon enough. They cannot do more than
murder us, and murder has merits when starvation's set against it. Come
on, my lads," said I, "and keep a weather-eye open."

This I said, and willingly they heard me; no gladder party ever went
down a hillside than we four, whom hunger drove on and thirst made
brave. Dangerous places, which we should have crossed with wary feet at
any other time, now found us reckless and hasty.

We bridged the chasms with the ladder, and slid down it as though it
had been a rope. The bird's nest, where five days ago we'd first found
shelter from the islanders, detained us now no longer than would
suffice for thirsty men to bathe their faces and their hands in the
brook which gushed out from the hillside, and to drink a draught which
they remembered to their dying day. Aye, refreshing it was, more than
words can tell, and such strength it gave us that, if there had been a
hundred men on the mountain path; I do believe our steps would still
have been set for the bungalow. For we were about to learn the truth.
Curiosity is a good wind, even when you're hungry.

Now, there was a place on the headland, three hundred feet above the
valley, perhaps, whereat the hill path turned and, for the first time,
the island was plainly to be seen. Here at this place we stopped all
together and began to spy out the woods through which we had raced for
our lives six days ago. The sun had but just set then, and, short as
the twilight is in these parts, there was enough of it for us to make a
good observation and to be sure of many things. What I think struck us
all at the first was the absence of any fog such as we had heard about
both from the Frenchman and Ruth Bellenden's diary. A bluish vapour, it
is true, appeared to steam up from the woods and to loom in hazy clouds
above the lower marshland. But of fog in the proper sense there was not
a trace; and although I began to find the air a little heavy to
breathe, and a curious stupidness, for which I could not altogether
account, troubled my head, nevertheless I made sure that the story of
sleep-time was, in the main, a piece of nonsense and that we should
soon prove it to be so. Nor were the others behind me in this.

"It is no fog I see which would slow me down a knot!" said Peter Bligh,
when the island came into view; "to think that a man should go without
his dinner for yon peat smoke!