In a straight line from each of these horns ran a slender ridge of snow-white surf, that was forever boiling up, rolling and breaking over a hidden coral reef, or sandbank. Within it the bay, and without it the sea, were, on this night, smooth, waveless, and calm as the cloudless sky, whose deep immensity of blue was mirrored in them.
There was scarcely a breath of wind to stir the pendent forest leaves.
I have been somewhat minute in describing all this, in consequence of the phenomenon which occurred on this night, and thus fixed the features of the scene in my memory.
It might have been about the hour of ten, and we were still loitering on the moonlit beach, when the cry of "A sail in sight!" made every heart leap wildly and with hope.
'Twas Tom Lambourne who spoke, but every eye caught the ship at once, and even those who had been dozing on the warm sand or within the hut were awake and on the beach in a moment, stretching their hands toward her with joy and exultation, but the aspect of the ship gradually changed all this into suspense and utter bewilderment.
She was a large square-rigged vessel—a ship running close-hauled on the port-tack (to use a man-o'-war phrase) and with nearly all her canvas set.
She was about four miles off the reef at the entrance of the bay, and was bearing directly toward it. Her canvas glimmered like snow in the moonshine, and we could see the red lights of her cabin windows flash at times upon the sea astern, and the whiteness of her long flush deck, as she careened before the breeze.
Yet how was it, we all asked, that there was not a breath of wind with us?
"Perhaps she brings it with her," suggested Hislop.
"And how came it to pass that she appeared right in the offing and outside the bay all at once?" asked Tom Lambourne.