The decks were concealed from him.

Overhead, the sky was blue and the gulls drove past and circled about
in white screaming clouds. Before him, and on either side, not five
hundred yards distant, loomed the mountain.

Martin stared intently and curiously, and, despite himself, that bleak
and desolate outlook sobered the gaiety of his mood. On three sides
the rock reared skyward, bare and black, with never a hint of
vegetation.

The mountain formed a rough cone; some two thousand feet overhead was
the summit, and over it hovered a cloud of white steam vapor, and a
twisting column of curiously yellow-brown smoke that trailed away
lazily on a light wind. Martin, staring at it, decided that the air he
breathed did have an alien, a sulphurous taint.

There were no raw fissures about the crater edge, and no evidence
beyond the rather thin volume of smoke that the volcano contained life.
Yet Martin seemed to hear, above the thunder of the surf in the fog
beneath him, a distant, ominous rumbling, as if the slumbering Vulcan
of the mountain were snoring in his sleep.

But it was the mountainside that longest held Martin's fascinated gaze.
For, in her fiery past, the volcano had clad her flanks with black lava
that was now molded into a vast chaos of fantastic architecture and
sculptures. It was as if an army of crazy artists had here expended
their lunatic energies.

He saw huge, round towers, leaning all awry; a vast pile fashioned like
a church front, with twin steeples canting drunkenly; the tremendous
columns the captain had told him of; jutting masses that hinted in
their half-formed outlines of gigantic, crouching beasts. And
everywhere in that weird field of shapes were the openings of
caves--dark blots in the black stone.

The mountain was truly a sponge-like labyrinth, Martin perceived. He
could not see the strip of beach, however, or the cavern mouth, shaped
like an elephant's head, of the whaleman's log. The fog hid them from
view.

But what he did see was sufficient. It was an evil landscape. It
loomed black and forbidding against the background of blue sky, and the
sun failed to lighten the aspect. It threatened. The stark
desolateness of the place was enhanced by the wild cawing of the gulls
and the mournful booming of the sea upon the reef.

Martin was depressed, as by a foreboding of ill fortune. He turned to
Rimoa, who was on the yard-arm with him, and spoke with forced
lightness--

"