“There’s the island,” said I to myself.
I snatched up the glass, and resolved the tiny piece of shading upon the horizon into the proportions of the ugly rock of cinders. It was twelve or fourteen miles distant down on the lee quarter.
“The deuce!” thought I. “What has been our drift? Where has the brig been running to? And yet Greaves told me he could trust Bol!”
I looked through the skylight, and immediately the captain, who lay upon the locker, opened his eyes and fastened them upon me.
“The island is in sight, sir.”
I made answer. He asked a few questions, then bade me shift the brig’s helm for the rock to complete our watering. Twenty minutes later we were standing once more for the island, with all plain sail heaped upon the brig, and a quiet air of wind blowing dead on end over the taffrail.
CHAPTER XX.
WE START FOR HOME.
We were off the island again by nine o’clock. Greaves was wise to fill his casks; the water was sweet, the road home long, and our peculiar care was not to be forced to look in anywhere for supplies of any sort. Yet it was as depressing as a disappointment to return to the island. Is there an uglier heap of rock in the wide world? The black lava of the scowling Galapagos yields nothing more horrid. And the spirit of its dark and horrible solitude visited you the more sharply because of the crawling, stealthy life you beheld low down by the wash of the beach, remote from the inland loneliness; the creeping shape of the elephant tortoise, of the black lizard, of crabs as huge as targets, and no further motion save what’s in the air, where the ocean fowl are glancing. That island was a fit tomb for the ship which it caverned. You thought of it as a grave, of the ship as a corpse; and the ugly heap of flat split cliff and black lava climbing into spires, and front of cinderous rock corrugated by the arrest of their glowing cataracts, fell cold upon the sight, and colder yet upon the heart.
We sent a hand aloft as before to keep a sharp lookout. The island lay square in the north, and while we hung hove-to off the reefs, at any hour something large and armed might come sailing up from the horizon at the back, and heave the breast of a royal over the western or eastern point ere we could guess that there was anything within leagues and leagues of us. Yan Bol took charge of the longboat and went ashore. It was a fine morning, but the sky looked dim, like a blue eye after tears; the sun had his sting of yesterday, but not his flash. A long swell swung through the sea, but the heave was out of the north, and we lay south, the land between; it was smooth here or we could have done little in the way of watering. The corners of the land illustrated the weight of the swell; the white water burst in clouds there, and the noise of it came along with the voice of a gathering storm.