It roared down the cliff; it swept over the shore. At its touch, the sea reared madly up in an appalling great wave, hissing out clouds of steam that veiled the livid light.
And upon me then there had fallen a dreadful fate: to be whelmed in burning lava!
I saw it coming, the wave of torment and of death. I gazed with a horrid fascination on its livid front, livid and black and shimmering like silver slime; and that instant was swollen thousandfold with agony.
In the next, by a sudden strong rebuff of the clashing seas, my boat was jerked slanting up, and cast upon the beakhead of the pirate barque!
She had lasked away from her moorings; and, unchecked by her drunken and amazed custodians, had blundered round to save me.
THE END.
SUPPLEMENT.
The manner of my preservation from the Haunted Island, as well as other particulars, may seem to many of my readers incredible; and some, perhaps, will not stickle to brand the whole relation as a fabulous tale.
I can only say, and I do aver it, that herein I have set down nothing but what really fell out in my experience, described nothing but what I really saw in my brief sojourn on the island; which is a misfortune one way, leaving some things inevitably obscure.
As to what happened to me after my escape in the pirate barque, ’tis beyond the drift of my relation, since nothing further transpired concerning the island itself. Indeed, as I believe, ’twas not only utterly devastated by that dreadful eruption and conflagration, but sunk to the bottom of the sea. And, as one returned from those parts did tell me, there goes a rumour amongst seafaring men of an enchanted island at the bottom of the sea. Perchance it was set on foot by those pirates who escaped with me; for, certainly, we alone survived.