ich we were so wonderfully
placed.

If our surroundings appeared curious by the spectral light of the moon
last night, they seemed doubly so now.

The glaring tropical sun was blazing already high up in the heavens,
whose bright blue vault was unflecked by a scrap of cloud to temper the
solar rays, while a brisk breeze, blowing in from the south-west, gave a
feeling of freshness to the air and raised a little wave of surf, that
broke on the beach with a rippling splash far astern; the cooing of the
doves in the distance chiming in musically with the lisp of the surge's
lullaby.

But, the land!

It was stranger than any I had ever seen.

The high mountain on our left, looked quite as lofty by day as it had
done the night before, two thousand feet or more of it towering up into
the sky.

It was evidently the crater peak of an old extinct volcano; for, it was
shaped like a hollow vase, with the side next the sea washed away by the
south-west gales, which, as I subsequently learnt, blew during the rainy
season in the vicinity of this equatorial region.

At the base of the cliff was a mound of lava, interspersed with tufts of
tufa and grass, that spread out to where the sloping, sandy beach met
it; and this was laved further down by the transparent water of the
little sheltered harbour formed by the outer edge of the peak and the
other lower projecting cliff that extended out into the sea on the
starboard side of the ship--the two making a semicircle and almost
meeting by the lava mound at the base of the broken crater, there not
being more than a couple of cables length between them.

Most wonderful to me was the fact of the ship having been carried so
providentially through such a narrow opening, without coming to grief on
the Scylla on the one hand, or being dashed to pieces against the
Charybdis on the other.

More wonderful still, though, was the sight the shore presented, as I
moved closer to the gangway, and, looking down over the bulwarks,
inspected the foreground below.

It was like a stray vista of some antediluvian world.

Near the edge of the white sand--on which the ship was lying like a
stranded whale, with her prow propped up between two dunes, or hillocks,
that wore up to the level of her catheads--was a row of stunted trees
without a leaf on them, only bare, skeleton branches; while on the other
side of these was a wide expanse of barren brown earth, or lava, utterly
destitute of any sign of v