“Glorious! Up there it is grand. I wish we were on the top.”
“All in good time. But you know how quickly the full day comes here near the equator. Keep looking.”
Jack wanted no telling, and for the next few minutes, with a curious sense of awe, wonder, and delight, he stood watching the line of light descending and making the beauties of the volcanic island start out of the gloom. The bands of cloud which hung round the sharp slope became roseate, golden, orange, and purple, and soon after the lad was gazing below the barren, glowing rocks at patches of golden green, then at the beginning of billows and deep valleys running down, the former of wonderful shades of green, the latter of deep dark velvety purple, across which silvery films of vapour were floating.
And still the light came down, casting wonderful shadows, setting towering pyramidical trees blazing as it were; and then all at once the boy could have believed that he was gazing where there was a gash of liquid fire pouring down into a dark valley, flashing and coruscating till it disappeared.
And still lower and lower, with wonderful rapidity now, as the great glowing disk was seen to rise above the edge of the sea, till the whole island was ablaze in the morning sunshine, and the gloomy, forbidding mass was one glorious picture of tropic beauty. Forests grouped themselves about the lower mountain slopes, lovely park-like stretches could be seen lower still, and beneath lower groves of palm-like trees a band of golden sand. Nearer still, thin lines of cocoa palms edging what appeared to be a lake of the purest blue, edged in turn with a sparkling line of foam, where the billows seemed to be eternally fretting to get over the surrounding reef and plunge themselves into the placid, perfectly calm lagoon.
Lastly there was the dark sea, now lit up into a gleaming plain of gently heaving waves; all being shot as it were with purple, where again patches of rippled damascened silver flashed in the opening of a new day.
“It is too beautiful,” muttered the boy to himself. “It seems almost as if it hurt and made one sad. Oh,” he said aloud, “and I never called him up to see.”
“Eh, what’s that?” said Sir John. “Think we were sleeping through all this? Oh no! What a glorious sunrise, my boy.”
“Glorious,” cried the doctor, grasping the boy’s arm. “I didn’t think Nature could be so grand. Here, I don’t feel as if I could wait for breakfast. Oh, Jack, my lad, what times we’re going to have out there.”
“Well, gentlemen,” said the captain, coming up with his face shining in the morning light, “will this do for you? What do you say to my island now?”