they
determine on making a stay here of at least a day or two. After this
long spell of laborious work, with the excitement which accompanied it,
they greatly need rest. Besides, all are now very hungry, having had no
opportunity of cooking aught since they left the landing-place on the
isle.

Where they are now there is no difficulty about fire, fuel being
plentiful all about. And while Caesar is preparing the repast, the
others transform the boat-sail into a tent, by setting up the oars,
trestle-fashion, and resting the mast on them as a ridge-pole.

Having satisfied the cravings of appetite, and completed their
arrangements for passing the night, it still lacks an hour of sunset,
and with nothing better to be done, they sit by the fire and contemplate
the landscape, at which hitherto they have but glanced. A remarkable
landscape it is--picturesque beyond description, and altogether unlike
the idea generally entertained of Fuegian scenery. That portion of it
which an artist would term the "foreground" is the cove itself, which is
somewhat like the shoe of a mule--running about a hundred yards into the
land, while less than fifty feet across the mouth. Its shores, rising
abruptly from the beach, are wooded with a thick forest, which covers
the steep sides of the encircling hills as far as can be seen, and to
the water's edge. The trees, tall and grand, are of three kinds, almost
peculiar to Tierra del Fuego. One is a true beech; another, as much
birch as beech; the third, an aromatic evergreen of world-wide
celebrity--the "Winter's-bark." [Note 2.] But there is also a growth
of buried underwood, consisting of arbutus, barberry, fuchsias,
flowering currants, and a singular fern, also occurring in the island of
Juan Fernandez, and resembling the _zamia_ of Australia.

The sea-arm on which the cove opens is but little over a mile in width,
the shore on its farther side being a sheer cliff, rising hundreds of
feet above the water, and indented here and there by deep gorges with
thickly-wooded sides. Above the cliff's crest the slope continues on
upward to a mountain ridge of many peaks, one of them a grand cone
towering thousands of feet above all the others. That is Mount Darwin,
wrapped in a mantle of never-melting snow. Along the intermediate space
between the cliff's crest and the snow-line is a belt of woodland,
intersected by what might be taken for streams of water, were it not for
their colour. But