“Let us go! Let us go!” cried Fritz.
“Yes; let us go!” Frank echoed him. “We shall be down before night.”
“And we will pass the night in the shelter of the trees,” Captain Gould added.
The last mists cleared away. Then the ocean was revealed over a distance which might be as much as eighteen or twenty miles.
This was an island—it was certainly an island!
They then saw that the northern coast was indented by three bays of unequal size, the largest of which lay to the north-west, another to the north, while the smallest opened to the north-east, and was more deeply cut into the coast-line than the other two. The arm of the sea which gave access to it was bounded by two distant capes, one of which had at its end a lofty promontory.
No other land showed out to sea. Not a sail appeared on the horizon.
Looking back towards the south the eye was held by the top of the crest of the cliff which enclosed Turtle Bay, five miles or so away.
What a contrast between the desert region which Captain Gould and his companions had just crossed and the land which now lay before their eyes! Here was a fertile and variegated champaign, forests, plains, everywhere the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics! But nowhere was there a hamlet, or a village, or a single habitation.
And then a cry—a cry of sudden revelation which he could not have restrained—broke from the breast of Fritz, while both his arms were stretched out towards the north.