It was Sunday morning. I was aroused by Will, who beat upon my cabin-door. He asked me if I was awake. I answered, ‘You may hear me.’
‘Then,’ said he, ‘step out and take a look at the island Butler’s to make you queen of, for I’ll be hanged if the heap of cinder isn’t right over the bows.’
I clothed myself in a breathless hurry, and, coming out, found Mr. Bates at the wheel and Will on the bulwarks, looking ahead, and Tom on the deck-house roof, pointing the brig’s telescope at the sea. The morning was bright and silent. A light north-easterly wind held the canvas hushed. Long lines of swell were flowing out of the south-east. For leagues northward and eastward the sea was full of the light of the sun.
I looked directly ahead, and instantly beheld a large, dim, violet cloud upon the horizon.
‘Is that Tristan d’Acunha, Tom?’
‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, turning quickly. ‘That’s our island, Marian.’
‘A noble hiding-place!’ I cried.
Indeed, that point of shadowy land lying upon the mighty face of the deep was such a revelation of loneliness that, when you viewed it and thought of the measureless leagues of ocean stretching from it west to the South Pacific, east to the Australian meridians, you thought that here only in this prodigious liquid waste was earth’s deepest, wildest, most awful secret of solitude to be learned and solved.
Tom’s eyes were upon me. He brought his face close and whispered, ‘They’ll never think of us as being there.’
‘It’s as lonely as a star.’