“An earthquake may have done it,” said Garlicke, “but not the one of three nights back. I can see great patches of lichen on the rocks. It’s centuries old—that great shutting of the door. Look at the banks of seaweed across it.”
Gerry had turned to stare up the ravine that rose from high-water mark to the mountain-side. Suddenly he stretched across to Garlicke for the glass, and began examining the far crags. Nothing that moved was visible to the naked eye, but as he put down the telescope he whistled softly.
“It’s either an extraordinary coincidence or a blessed funny thing,” he ejaculated.
“What?” we demanded.
“The black line that runs across the cliff up there,” he went on. “We shall find that that’s coal, when we get nearer, I don’t mind betting. Through the glass I can distinctly see the shine and gloss of it, and it’s perished and crumbled away as coal would—in square lumps.”
“Well,” said I irritably, “what if it is? Why shouldn’t there be coal? Nothing would surprise me less than to find that those black things upon the beach are patent stoves. Nothing would be too outrageous for this land of sudden upheavals.”
He looked at me with much contempt.
“Lessaution’s estimate of your intelligence was not far out,” he remarked. “Do you mean to say you have forgotten the coal the Mayans found—the ‘stone with fern marks upon it’ that burnt—the stone, that is, not the fern marks? Well, there’s your seam of stone or coal or whatever you like to call it, and here’s the very spot on which the Mayans landed three hundred years ago. That’s the place where the Beast munched up poor Alfa and Hardal. The penguins which they knocked over and roasted—or rather their descendants—are there, and this is the intricate passage by which they found harbor, only the rocks have barred the entrance. There isn’t a doubt about it.”
I looked around me, and there seemed every possibility that he was right. All these circumstances dovetailed into one another most remarkably—the coal, the sandy shore, the penguins, and what not. The only thing wanting to complete the picture was the “Great god Cay with mouth agape,” and though for the time being he was not on view, we knew only too well that he was a very unpleasant reality. So down the red-hot cliffs we scrambled for a nearer examination of these possibilities, and after half-an-hour’s toil by ways devious and hard to find dropped upon the shining sands at the bottom.