"Come and take a look at this," whispered Steve so as not to wake Peter in the opposite bunk.
"This" proved to be a solid wall of mist towering over the ship like a precipice. The trade wind had fallen to a stark calm, and the dream ship lay wallowing on an oily swell. A young moon rode clear overhead, and myriads of monstrous stars glared down at us; yet still this ominous gray wall lay fair in our path.
"It ought not to be land," said Steve, "but I don't like the look of it."
Neither did I. We stood side by side, straining our eyes into the murk. A soft barking, for all the world like that of a very old dog, sounded somewhere to port. Splashes, as of giant bodies striking the water, accompanied by flashes of phosphorescent light, came at intervals from all sides, and presently the faint lap of water reached our ears.
"Mother of Mike!" breathed Steve. "We're alongside something."
At that moment, and as though impelled by some silent mechanism, the pall of mist lifted, revealing an inky black wall of rock not fifty yards distant.
My frenzied efforts at the flywheel of the motor auxiliary were futile, as I had more than half expected. Who has ever heard of these atrocities answering in an emergency? We had no sweeps. To anchor was a physical impossibility; the lead-line vanished as probably twenty other lead-lines would have vanished after it in those fathomless waters. So we stood, watching the dream ship drift to her doom.
What happened during the next hour is as hard to describe as I have no doubt it will be to believe. The Galapagos Islands are threaded with uncertain currents, and one was setting us now on to the rocky face of an islet cut as clean and sheer to the sea as a slice of cheese. We should have touched but for our fending off. There is no other way of describing our antics than to say that we clawed our way along that rocky wall until at the end of it a faint air caught the jib, the foresail, the mainsail, and we stood away without so much as a scratch.
Sunrise that morning was the weirdest I have ever seen. There are over two thousand volcano cones in the Galapagos Islands, and apparently we were in the midst of them. On all hands and at all distances were rugged peaks one hundred to two thousand feet high, rising sheer from a rose-pink sea into a crimson sky. Sleek-headed seals broke water alongside, peered at us for a space with their fawnlike eyes, barked softly, and were gone. Pelicans soared above our truck, and fell like a stone on their prey. Tiny birds, yellow and red, flitted about the deck or flew through the skylights, and settled on the cabin fittings with the utmost unconcern. And down under, in the crystal-clear depths, vague shapes hovered constantly: sharks, dolphin, turtle, and ghastly devil fish.
All life seemed confined to water and air; never was dry land so desolate and sinister as those myriads of volcanic cones. Yet one of them was peopled with human beings. Which? We were lost, if ever a ship was lost, in the labyrinths of an ash heap.