wall of stones battered to pieces and scorched by
lightning--with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach. The
noise of their continuous and violent screaming filled the air.

This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from Batu Beru; it
would meet her on quiet evenings, a pitiless and savage clamor enfeebled
by distance, the clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for
a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it especially on board;
it was the voice of their ship's unerring landfall, ending the steady
stretch of a hundred miles. She had made good her course, she had run
her distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by one, the
points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . . and the cloud of birds
hovered--the restless cloud emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the
sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,
of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a flaw.

But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she
would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night.
All would be still, dumb, almost invisible--but for the blotting out of
the low constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses of the
islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst the dark spaces of the
heaven: and the ship's three lights, resembling three stars--the red and
the green with the white above--her three lights, like three companion
stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving course for the
passage at the southern end of the group. Sometimes there were human
eyes open to watch them come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber
void; the eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a reef.
He thought drowsily: "Ha! The fire-ship that once in every moon goes in
and comes out of Pangu bay." More he did not know of her. And just as he
had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating the calm water
a mile and a half away, the time would come for the Sofala to alter her
course, the lights would swing off him their triple beam--and disappear.

A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast tribe of
long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove for their living in this
lonely wilderness of islets, lying like an abandoned outwork of the land
at the gates of the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the
water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky
canoes, scooped o