here was a thundering row who should
stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so that
you could see the top of the masts that was still standing perfectly
distinctly. The row ending in all coming in the boat. I went down in the
diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.
"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was
a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here
think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm trees
and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way.
Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks
like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs
and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy
calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with
huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and
darting things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and
pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again
after the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other
way forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in
the middle.
"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond a lump of rocks
towards the line of the sea.
"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.
"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling so
safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I was
in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught
up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat
round. When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I
shut the valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and
jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat
pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my
head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast.
I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have
bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.
"Of cou
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