The sailor’s caution would have come too late,—even had it been necessary to the safety of the Catamaran’s crew. Fortunately it was not: for that imprudent shout produced an effect which at once changed the current of the thoughts, not only of Ben Brace, but of those who had given utterance to it.
Their united voices, pealing across the tranquil bosom of the deep, caused a sudden change in the appearance of the island; or rather among the people who inhabited it. If human beings, they must be of a strange race,—very strange indeed,—to have been furnished with wings! How otherwise could they have forsaken their footing on terra firma,—if the island was such,—and soared upward into the air, which one and all of them did, on hearing that shout from the Catamaran?
There was not much speculation on this point on the part of the Catamaran’s crew. Whatever doubts may have been engendered as to the nature of the island, there could be no longer any about the character of its inhabitants.
“Dey am birds!” suggested the Coromantee; “nuffin more and nuffin less dan birds!”
“You’re right, Snowy,” assented the sailor. “They be birds; and all the better they be so. Yes; they’re birds, for sartin. I can tell the cut o’ some o’ their jibs. I see frigates, an’ a man-o’-war’s-man, an’ boobies among ’em; and I reckon Old Mother Carey has a brood o’ her chickens there. They be all sizes, as ye see.”
It was no more a matter of conjecture, as to what kind of creatures inhabited the island. The forms that had been mystifying the crew of the Catamaran, though of the biped class, were no longer to be regarded as human beings, or even creatures of the earth. They had declared themselves denizens of the air; and, startled by the shouts that had reached them,—to them, no doubt, sounds strange, and never before heard,—they had sought security in an element into which there was no fear of being followed by their enemies, either of the earth or the water.