This was all well said, but Dolly Venn, quicker with his eyes, remarked a stranger fact.
"There's no one about, sir, that I can see," said he, wisely, "and no lights in the houses either. I wonder where all the people are? It's curious that we shouldn't see some one."
He put it as a kind of question; but before I could answer him Seth Barker chimed in with his deep voice, and pointed towards the distant reef:
"They've lit up the sea, that's what they've done," said he.
"By thunder, they have!" cries Peter Bligh, in his astonishment; "and generous about it, too. Saw any one such a thing as that?"
He indicated the distant reef, which seemed, as I bear witness, ablaze with lights. And not only the reef, mark you, but the sea about it, a cable's length, it may be, to the north and the south, shone like a pool of fire, yellow and golden, and sometimes with a rare and beautiful green light when the darkness deepened. Such a spectacle I shall never see again if I sail a thousand ships! That luscious green of the rolling seas, the spindrift tossed in crystals of light, foam running on the rocks, but foam like the water of jewels, a dazzling radiance—aye, a very carpet of quivering gold. Of this had they made the northern channel. How it was done, what cleverness worked it, it needed greater brains than mine to say. I was for all the world like a man struck dumb with the beauty of something which pleases and awes him in the same breath.
"Lights under the sea, and people living there! It's enough to make a man doubt his senses," said I. "And yet the thing's true, lads: we're sane men and waking; it isn't a story-book. You can prove it for yourselves."
"Aye, and men going in and out like landsmen to their houses," cried Peter, almost breathless; "it's a fearsome sight, captain, a fearsome sight, upon my word."
The rest of us said nothing. We were just a little frightened group that stared open-mouthed upon a seeming miracle. If we regarded the things we saw with a seaman's reverence, let no one make complaint of that. The spectacle was one to awe any man; nor might we forget that those who appeared to live below the sea lived there, as Ruth Bellenden had told us, because the island was a death-trap. We were in the trap and none to show us the road out.
"Peter," said I, suddenly, for I wished to turn their thoughts away from it, "are you forgetting it's dinner-time?"