visable, even
had they wished it--which they did not--it sufficed Leslie that the
whole appearance of the place confirmed his previous conviction that the
volcano was extinct; and without wasting a second glance upon it he at
once turned his attention to the scene beneath him.

They had happened, by a stroke of good luck, to hit upon the very
highest point in the lip of the crater, and they were thus enabled to
see, from the spot on which they stood, the entire extent of the island,
to its uttermost limits; and they found it much bigger than they had
anticipated.

In plan it bore a rough resemblance to a right-angled triangle, the body
of which had been so twisted as to cause its apex to bear to the right.
The base of this triangle, opposite to which the wreck of the brig could
be seen as a tiny toy almost immediately beneath them, faced south-east,
and appeared to measure between three and four miles across between its
two extreme points, while the side corresponding to the perpendicular of
the triangle was, according to Leslie's estimate, nearly, if not quite,
ten miles long. The crater was situated not in the centre of the
island, but quite close to its south-eastern side, which accounted for
the steepness of the acclivity that the explorers had been obliged to
climb. Northward of the crater, after the first five hundred feet of
steep decline that formed the summit proper, the ground, undulating
picturesquely, fell away in quite a gentle slope to the most northerly
extremity of the island, which Leslie judged to be a fairly bold
headland. The barrier reef, upon which the brig lay stranded, was
visible with startling distinctness throughout its entire length from
this point; and Leslie observed that it formed a natural and most
efficient breakwater to the lagoon that stretched along the entire
south-east shore of the island, curving gradually round in a crescent
form until it joined the island itself at its most westerly extremity,
while away to the eastward there was a deep-water passage, between the
reef and the island, of about an eighth of a mile in width.

Turning his attention once more to the island itself, Leslie observed
that it was wooded to its uttermost extremity, and that no beach was to
be discovered in any direction save that upon which they had landed, the
ground appearing everywhere else to slope precipitously to the sea, in
the form of bold cliffs. And, as savages would naturally build their
v