ot upon the islands, or knew,
except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was
with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the
bosom of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The
land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and
buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl
and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The
suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were
confounded with the articulations of the mountain; and the isle and its
unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.
There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.
Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay
concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-mark given--a
certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack
and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary
of nature. These we were to find; for these we craned and stared,
focussed glasses, and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and
the land close ahead before we found them. To a ship approaching, like
the _Casco_, from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous
features of a striking coast; the surf flying high above its base;
strange, austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and
Jane, or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the
breakers.

Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the
explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there
was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that
quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,
the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach
and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The
trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have
been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the
Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now
with a deeper entry; and the _Casco_, hauling her wind, began to slide
into the bay of Anaho. The coco-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so
graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen
crowding on the beach, and climbing and