ounding our way towards where the
_Ocean Pioneer_ had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey
rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off
about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was a thundering row
who should stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so
that you could see the top of the masts that was still standing perfectly
distinctly. The row ended in all coming in the boat. I went down in the
diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was a
queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here think
every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm-trees and
surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way. Not
common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks like
ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and
things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and
clear, and showing you a kind of dirty gray-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting things
going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools and the heaps
was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after the fires and
cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way forest, too, and a
kind of broken--what is it?--amby-theatre of black and rusty cinders
rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the _Pride of Banya_, lying out beyond a lump of
rocks towards the line of the sea.

"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.

"_I_ don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I
was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught up
the bogey, and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat round.
When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I shut the
valve from the air-belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped overboard,
feet foremost--for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all
of them staring down into water after me, as my h