‘Where is your ship?’
‘It was over there, but it has sailed away.’
‘On the south side. But don’t you know that the landing-place is on the north?’
‘I know nothing. I never thought to find a living, still less a civilised, soul in this place. Tell me where I am.’
‘You don’t seem to know much geography,’ she said, with an offended air. But she was mollified in a moment. ‘How faint you must be! Lean on me. If you don’t, I will carry you, whether you like it or no. Poor thing!’
I wanted no support, but I was nothing loath to lean upon Victoria. So we walked away, with an arm round each other’s waist, as innocently affectionate as the primal pair.
She led me towards another slope of the Peak, and, all too soon for me, with such leading, we reached the top.
The whole island lay before me, from sea to sea, quivering with life in the morning sun. In its irregular outline, it seemed like some quaint sea monster that had shot up from the depths of the Pacific to take a look round, and that might instantly disappear. It was head and shoulders out of the water, joining the sea almost everywhere at the base of perpendicular rocks rising to heights of from four to six hundred feet, and it had little or no beach. On all sides, the wave seemed in fretful strife with the rock, but beyond the broken lines of surf lay the calm of the immeasurable ocean, with nothing in the way, it seemed, between this and the next world. The range of hills cutting the island in half from east to west sloped to the edge of the cliff; on the southern side, in deep valleys, filled with plantation plots; on the northern, into two terraced spaces, one above the other, commanding a view of the sea. On the highest of these lay a settlement of civilised men, its cottages lapped warm, like birds in their mosses, in exquisite vegetation—palms, and banyans, and cocoa-nut trees, and, as I might guess, by what was nearer to the view, passion-flowers, and trumpet vines, and creeping plants of infinite variety, the rich growth clothing even the adjacent summits and hillsides, and the sharp inaccessible slopes, right down to the water’s edge. Below the settlement, on the lower terrace, was a grove of cocoa-trees, with no habitation, and below this again, a little bay, evidently the landing-place, and the only one on this cruel shore. All this beauty of nature and homely sweetness of ordered life, lying to the north of the dividing ridge, had been hidden from me in my rude landing-place, even the cultivated valleys being shut out by a transverse section of the rock.
We were still standing on the hill when, from a clump of cocoa at its foot, a little girl came running towards us—a reduced copy, to scale, of Victoria, in build and strength and perfect animal grace. Without standing in the least upon ceremony, she gave me a most hearty kiss, and asked me my name.
‘I wonder now if you could read it,’ I said, feeling in my pocket for the card-case which I had kept by me in all my wanderings, and extracting from it a card that showed woeful traces of the ducking of the night before. The little one’s eyes dilated in wonder as she read the inscription, and in one swift glance took me in from head to foot. Then she turned, and started for the village, at breakneck speed down the steep incline, shouting as she went, ‘Mother! mother! Here’s a lord!’