Too utterly astounded to offer any resistance, Danvers was hurried along the deck to the main hatch and made to descend. The hold was empty, but an armed native was there awaiting the prisoner.
Diaz followed him below.
“You are to make no noise, nor speak to the sentry,” he said, with a sullen savageness; “if you do I shall put on the hatches.”
Danvers was no coward, but his heart sank within him. “Is this a joke, or has Captain Brabant gone mad?”
The Chileno looked at him with blazing eyes, and half raised his hand as if to strike. Then, without a word, he turned away and went on deck.
Brabant was seated on the skylight with an outspread chart before him.
“Keep her S.S.W., Pedro. We are steering for Hunter's Island. Set the squaresail.”
For five days the Loelia steered steadily before the trade wind, till one morning there lay before her a huge, treeless cone, whose barren, rugged sides rose blackly from the sea.
Not a vestige of vegetation was visible anywhere from the cutter, and from the summit of the cone, and from long, gaping fissures in the sides, ascended thin, wavering clouds of dull, sulphurous smoke. Here and there were small bays, whose shores showed narrow beaches of black sand, upon which the surf thundered and clamoured unceasingly. Not even a wandering sea-bird was to be seen, and the only sound that disturbed the dread silence of the place was the roar of the breakers mingling with the muffled groanings and heavings of the still struggling and mighty forces of Nature in the heart of the island—forces which, ninety-five years before, had found a vent and destroyed every living thing, man and beast, in one dreadful outburst of flame, whose awful reflection was seen a hundred leagues away.
It was a place of horror and desolation, set in a lonely sea, appalling in appearance to the human eye.