“But all the land in yonder used to be burned forest, Tandy.”
Tandy quietly handed him the glass.
The forest he now looked upon was not composed of living trees, but of skeletons, their weird shapes now covered entirely by a wealth of trailing parasites and flowery climbing plants.
“I am satisfied now, and I think we may drop nearer shore, and let go the anchor.”
In an hour’s time the Sea Flower lay within two hundred yards of the beach.
This position was by no means a safe one were a heavy storm to blow from either the north or the west. There would be nothing for it then but to get up anchor and put out to sea, or probably lie to under the shelter of rocks and cliffs to the southward of the island.
The bay itself was a somewhat curious one. The dark blue which was its colour showed that it was deep, and the depth continued till within seventy yards of the shore, when it rapidly shoaled, ending in a snow-white semicircle of coral sands. Then at the head of the bay, only on the east side, stretching seawards to that bold promontory, was a line of high, black, beetling cliffs, the home of those wheeling sea-birds. These cliffs were of solid rock of an igneous formation chiefly, but marked here and there with veins of what appeared to be quartz. They were, moreover, indented with many a cave: some of these, it was found out afterwards, were floored with stalagmites, while huge icicle-like stalactites depended from their roofs.
Rising to the height of at least eight hundred feet above these cliffs was one solitary conical hill, green-wooded almost to its summit.
The western side of the bay, and, indeed, all this end of the island, was low, and fringed with green to the water’s edge; but southwards, if one turned his eye, a range of high hills was to be seen, adding materially to the beauty of the landscape.
The whole island—which was probably not more than sixteen miles in length, by from eight to nine in width—was divided by the river mentioned in Captain Halcott’s narrative into highlands and lowlands.