all other objects in interest. It is the wildest, most stern
and romantic of all the islands I have yet seen. Its
dark walls rise straight from the rim of the green,
motionless sea, and the lowliest footing on it seems to
be five hundred feet high. Its crest is like a series
of sharp iron teeth. A few trees find, by some miracle,
a foothold on this forbidding exterior. Purple jelly-fish
with streaming beards swarm in its neighbourhood, and
small fry leap in terror out of the sea about it, like
fireworks of silver. A low dark line at its pedestal
marks the limit of high water. The passages between
it and its satellites are like the fiords of some inferno,
and the transition from its shadow into the sunlight
is as quick and sudden as the transition of a solar eclipse.
Its black sides stream with milky cataracts of lime;
dark caves lead into its bowels near the sea-rim, and
in them, reaching away into blind interiors of the rock,
the edible-nest makers build their homes. It is a terrible,
picturesque place, worthy of a Salvator Rosa. A great
echo resides under its bastions, and the launch’s heart
beats near it with a muffled roar, that borders on the
supernatural.
Such are some of the impressions made by a first
circumnavigation of this island—and at some distance,
for the launch approached it at her peril. To make a
closer acquaintance I caused the launch to anchor, and
made in the gig for a small strip of yellow sand, the
only visible landing-place on the island. This brought
me unexpectedly into a circular bay, of which a fraction
only was open to the ocean. The water here was an