same utterly darkness that was of such disaster to you honorable
gentlemen last night. Honorable Carew did not suspect the nearness of
land. The rock pierced our bottom and we sank with immediateness.
Ah--it was of much sadness! We saved not food or clothes and but half
our number. We rowed away.

"After while, there came to us a morning of much niceness, like the
present one, and we found that the schooner had been altogether taken,
as honorable Carew remarked by one god of the sea, named David Jones.
So we rowed around the volcano and came in this bay, and I knew the
place from the memory I had of hearing the reading, so long ago, in
Honolulu.

"Ah, but the days we spent here before the worthy _Cohasset_ was
sighted were days of much badness! We thought you had come and
departed, for we did not find the ambergris. We thought we would all
have to go out from hunger and exposure. We thought it would be of
much sadness to go out in this place of blackness; the spirits of our
honorable ancestors would regard us with much unkindness if we came
from this evil place." The man suddenly leered upon Martin. "How
would you like to go out in this place of bleakness? Ah--what a
sadness!"

He turned and stared at the fantastic, brooding face of the rapidly
nearing rock.

"I will with frankness say I do not like this place," he concluded. "I
shall be of gladness when I see the last of that smoke, up there, and
feel no more the shakes of awfulness."

They were within a few yards of the beach. Martin stared upward. The
mountain tapered steeply to the crater thousands of feet above him.
The yellow-brown smoke poured upward lazily, and he was sensible, as on
the day before, of an acrid, unpleasant taste in the air. Also, as
when he had obtained his first fog-obscured view of the mountain from
the topgallantyard, he felt oppressed as he looked at that desolate
wilderness of crazily jumbled rock towering above him; the sunlight,
which sparkled upon the water, failed to brighten the mountain's somber
tone, and the nightmare architecture looming above him shivered him
with dread.

The openings of numberless caves gaped blackly, like blind eyes. The
myriad-voiced screeching of the sea-birds added to the bleakness of the
aspect. As Moto swept the boat through the gentle surf that laved the
little beach, the Fire Mountain was invested, in Martin's excited mind,
with personality, with a malignant, evil personality.

In