other crags of
the reef defying the tides; these and the silence of the night
everywhere; but of men I saw nothing. The bloody fight we had
anticipated, blow for blow, and ringing alarm, the struggle for
foothold on the rock, the challenge to Czerny's men--such things did
not befall. We stood unchallenged on the plateau, and we stood alone.

I said that it was a miracle, and yet the Lord knows it was no miracle
at all.

Let me try and describe this place for you that you may understand our
situation more clearly, and how it befell that such a simple
circumstance brought about such a strange turn of fortune. We had come
up from the heart of the reef, as you know, and the staircase led out
to a gate of steel opening in the face of a rocky crag, which stood
well above the level even of the storm-seas. A lower plateau (unwashed
by the sea) stood below the gate, and other crags jutted out of the sea
and showed windows to the western sun. I made a bit of a map of the
land and water thereby to keep it in my memory: and such as it is it
will enable any one easily to get the position truly. If one places
himself at the main gate of this house of wonders and puts Czerny's
crew by the sword-fish reef, all will be plain to him.

The island lay perhaps a mile to the southward; and nearer to us, at a
cable's length as I reckoned it, a group of rocky pinnacles in the open
sea marked the door we had shut and the ladder by which Czerny's men
went in to shelter. But the oddest thing of all was this, that the main
gate to this house of wonders should be left unguarded at an hour so
critical. Dark as it was, with only the soft grey light of a summer's
night shimmering on sea and land, nevertheless the mere fact that we
had passed unchallenged told me that we were alone. For why should two
men let three pass up and raise no alarm when alarm might mean so much?

Could they not have struck us down as we came out, one by one, firing
their guns to call comrades from the sea, and bringing a hundred more
atop of us to end our chances there and then? Of course they could; and
yet it was not done. No man hailed us; we had the breaking seas at our
feet, the fresh air in our lungs, the spindrift wet upon our faces. And
who was the more surprised, I at finding the gate unguarded or my
comrades to discover that there was such a gate at all, the Lord only
knows. Like three who stumbled upon a precipice we halted there at the
sea's edge, and looked