“I don’t doubt it, sir; I don’t doubt it at all,” answered Chips soothingly; “but it’s a wonder to me how you’ve been able to find your way to it; for it’s only a little bit of a rock after all—a hextinc’ volcano, I’ve heard some people say. How far d’ye reckon we are off from it, now, Mr Troubridge?”
“Probably about seventeen or eighteen miles,” said I.
“Ah!” observed Chips. “Then we ought to be abreast of it soon a’ter breakfast.” And therewith he fell into a reverie.
It was about an hour later that, preceded by a slight chilling of the air, the first faint pallor of dawn came filtering through the velvet darkness ahead, stealing imperceptibly higher and higher into the eastern sky, and causing the stars thereaway to dwindle and grow dim until, one after another, they vanished in the cold, colourless light that now stretched along the horizon beneath our jibboom-end, spreading right and left, even as one stood and watched it. Then a faint flush of palest primrose stole into the pallor, against which the horizon line ran black as ebony, with here and there a suspicion of a gleam coming and going between it and the ship, as the growing light fell upon the gently heaving swell. A moment later a great shaft of white light shot perpendicularly from the horizon far ahead toward the zenith, where the indigo was swiftly paling to purest ultramarine, the primrose hue became more pronounced, and there, in the very midst of it, where the colour was strongest, rose a hummock of softest, most delicate and ethereal amethyst, clean-cut as a cameo, and shaped—as the carpenter had said—like the back of a gigantic whale, with three well-marked protuberances growing out of it, while others showed just clear of the water, toward what might be supposed to be the tail end.
“There you are, Chips,” I exclaimed in a fever of exultation; “there is the island—”
“Land ho! straight ahead,” shouted the lookout at this moment, as he faced aft, pointing with his right hand over the bows.
“Ay, ay, Jimmy, my hearty, we sees it, plain enough,” answered the carpenter. Then he turned to me and continued:
“Yes, sir; there it is, as you says. Ay, and it’s Saint Paul, too; ne’er a doubt of it. I reckernizes them there hummicks a-stickin’ up out of the back of it. And I reckon that it’s just about fourteen mile away—which brings your calcilations right to a hapigraphy. Well, well, hedication’s a most wonderful thing, and no mistake. The bosun and I might ha’ searched for that there rock till all was blue, and never ha’ found it; but you comes along and gets aboard of us eight hunderd mile away, and—says you—‘we’ll sight Saint Paul as we runs down our eastin’’; and, although we’ve been headin’ all round the compass since then, there’s the hiland, right enough, and just where you said it would be, ay, to the very hinch.”
I was vastly tickled at the man’s enthusiastic admiration of my little twopenny-halfpenny feat of navigation, and—secretly—very proud of it myself; but, of course, in reality it was an exceedingly commonplace exploit, which any other navigator worthy of being so-called could have accomplished without the slightest difficulty, the only essentials to success being good instruments, clear skies, and correct arithmetic, all of which I fortunately possessed. But I was nevertheless highly elated at my success, chiefly, I think, because, it being my first independent attempt to navigate a ship, I had demonstrated to myself my ability to do so.
The day now grew fast in the east; the primrose hue softened away, right and left, into a tint of warm grey with a faint suggestion of rose in it; the stars had all vanished save one solitary gem that hung low in the western sky like a silver lamp; the zenith was a rich, pure ultramarine, that was fast spreading toward the western horizon and chasing the last lingering shadow of night before it. Great spokes of radiant light were darting aloft from behind the island and touching into gold a few small, scattered flakes of fleecy cloud that floated high over our mastheads. Then, all in a moment, the small, faintly-gleaming bit of land ahead became transformed, as it might be with a magician’s wand, into a block of deepest, richest purple, bristling with rays of burning gold, a throbbing rim of molten gold swept into view from behind it, and in an instant it vanished amid a blinding blaze of sunlight that flashed across the ocean toward us, transfiguring its erstwhile surface of ebony into a tremble of turquoise and gold, outlining every spar and sail and rope in the ship with thin, golden wires, and causing every bit of glass and polished metal-work to blaze and scintillate with golden fire. The watch appeared, yawning and stretching as they emerged from their hiding places, blinking like owls as they stared over the bows endeavouring to pick out from the dazzle ahead the shape of land that the lookout was pointing to; and the carpenter emerged from his reverie to shout: