shadow of the leeward cape; and across the wide opening
the nearest of a group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy
yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the hummocky tops
of other islets peeped out motionless above the water of the channels
between, scoured tumultuously by the breeze.

The usual track of the Sofala both going and returning on every trip led
her for a few miles along this reefinfested region. She followed a broad
lane of water, dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the
earth's crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks run in disorder
upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals. Some of these fragments of land
appeared, indeed, no bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat,
lay awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts of stone;
several, heavily timbered and round at the base, emerged in squat domes
of deep green foliage that shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch
of cloud shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally season. The
thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently over that cluster; it turned
then shadowy in its whole extent; it turned more dark, and as if more
still in the play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals
of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished--dissolving utterly at times
in the thick rain--to reappear clear-cut and black in the stormy light
against the gray sheet of the cloud--scattered on the slaty round table
of the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of years, unfretted
by the strife of the world, there it lay unchanged as on that day, four
hundred years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of a
high-pooped caravel.

It was one of these secluded spots that may be found on the busy sea,
as on land you come sometimes upon the clustered houses of a hamlet
untouched by men's restlessness, untouched by their need, by their
thought, and as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted
generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of seafowl, urging
their way from all the points of the horizon to sleep on the outer rocks
of the group, unrolled the converging evolutions of their flight in
long somber streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating cloud of
their wings soared and stooped over the pinnacles of the rocks, over
the rocks slender like spires, squat like martello towers; over the
pyramidal heaps like fallen ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders
showing like a