n went
down," I replied. "I guess it is somewhere at the end of this staircase
that we are trying to climb."

"Oh, Gee!" cried the boy. "Say, this game has got those two girls scared
to death. There's something wrong with the place, Verslun. My skin feels
it. The island looks as if it has been left too long by itself, and I'm
beginning to think that all those rocks and trees are watching us and
wondering what we want here."

That was how it felt to me from the moment I had left _The Waif_, and I
had tried vainly to overcome the feeling. The island seemed to resent
the appearance of human beings. It possessed a personality through being
too long by itself. It had wrapped itself round a dead past, and we were
filled with the awe which suddenly strikes the unimaginative globe
trotter who wanders into the cool recesses of a Hindu temple. And I was
of the same opinion as Holman regarding the trees and rocks. Traders in
the lonely spots of the Pacific have gone insane through becoming
convinced that the mountains and the trees were watching their
movements, and the trees and rocks upon the Isle of Tears struck me as
possessing a watchfulness that smacked of the supernatural. I thought
of the story which the sailor told in the cafe chantant at Papeete just
then, and I was inclined to give it more credence than I had at the
moment he narrated it.

But I tried to rally Holman so that he would cheer up Edith Herndon and
her sister.

"You're like an old woman," I growled. "Go back to the girls and make
them laugh over some funny stories instead of getting nightmares about
the scenery. Why, this place reminds me of a real pretty bit of scenery
near my home town in Maine."

Of course I lied when I said that. You couldn't find any scenery like
that outside the tropics. That place was queer; there wasn't the
slightest doubt about that. I recalled as I stumbled along how a trader
at Metalanim in the Caroline Islands had swam out to our schooner when
we were down there the previous year, and how the poor devil had told
old Hergoff, the captain, that a chatak tree at the back of his hut had
begun to make faces at him, and I began to understand the complaint that
had gripped that trader as I climbed along by the side of the puffing
islanders. He had been jammed up too close against a personality. When a
place has been too long by itself, as Holman had remarked, it cultivates
a strength that tries the nerves of an explorer, more espe