"Even if I had known all that I should have lost my nerve; for, say what you like, captain, our danger was a very real one. The terremoto has done one good thing, anyhow: it has inspired El Chico and El Toro with an immense respect for your courage. We won't tell them that you were forewarned by the pilot book. You can do what you like with those men after this, Captain Allen. For the future they are your obedient slaves."
The brave trade wind blew without intermission for ten days, and then Carew, being in the latitude of Rio de Janeiro, steered due west for the land, which, according to his dead-reckoning, was not two hundred miles distant. It was night, and the wind having fallen light, the yacht made little progress. At midnight Carew came on deck to relieve the mate.
"Look over there," said Baptiste, pointing across the vessel's bows to the westward. "Those are the lights of Rio."
"What! so soon?" cried Carew; and turning his eyes in the indicated direction he perceived, not indeed the gleam of a lighthouse or other ordinary sign of approaching land, but an appearance as of a stormy dawn. High above the horizon hung masses of clouds whose lower surface was of a faint red, as if they were reflecting some immense conflagration too far away to be yet visible.
"You cannot distinguish any other city in the world from such a distance," said the mate. "When you are one hundred miles—yes, and more than that—away, you can tell the position of Rio de Janeiro by the glare that hangs over it at night. The gaslights there are innumerable. I have heard that it is the best lighted city in the world, and I believe it. At midnight the streets are illuminated as if for a fête; and, what is more, all the roads and paths that lead out into the country and up to the tops of the mountains are better lit than any of the streets in your London. Ah, the capital of the Brazils is a wonderful place!"
As Carew discovered later on, Baptiste had not exaggerated the facts.
At daybreak Carew was still on deck, being anxious to catch a first glimpse of the New World after so many weeks upon the desert seas.
When the sun rose the blue sky was cloudless, but the western horizon was obscured by a white fog, which, Baptiste said, nearly always hovered over this coast at early morning.
Of a sudden the upper portion of the mist lifted, and high above them there appeared, as if floating in mid-air, the summit of a huge mountain. It was of cubical shape, with perpendicular sides of bare, smooth stone, like the altar of some giant race—a marvellous sight to thus burst suddenly upon men who had for so long seen nothing but sky and water.
"That is the Gavia Mountain," cried Baptiste; "it lies to the left of the entrance of the Bay of Rio."