y existed it would be found not very far from
the peak that had just hove in sight. But of that I should perhaps be
better able to judge when I could see a little more of it. I therefore
took the ship's telescope out of the beckets where it hung in the
companion, and, slinging it over my shoulder, made my way up to the
royal yard, where I seated myself comfortably and, steadying the tube of
the instrument against the masthead, brought it to bear upon the land to
windward. From my elevated position this now showed as a steep cone of
moderate height rising from one extremity of a long range of lofty hills
running away in a south-easterly direction until they sank below the
horizon.

So far, so good; the contours of the distant land, as revealed by the
lenses of the telescope, agreed in a general way fairly accurately with
a sketch--made from memory by Barber--in the late skipper's diary,
illustrating a passage descriptive of the appearance of the treasure
country as it had appeared to the man upon his departure from it. If,
as we drew nearer, a certain arrangement of white rocks outcropping on
the hill-side immediately below the cone should reveal itself, I should
then know, beyond all possibility of doubt, that I had found the spot of
which we were in search. But this condition of certainty could not
possibly be arrived at before the morrow, at the earliest, for the land
was quite fifty miles away, it was dead to windward, and the ship--
working up against a light breeze--was approaching it at the rate of
less than a knot an hour.

Happily for our impatience, matters shortly afterwards improved
somewhat, for with the setting of the sun the breeze freshened, and by
the end of the second dog-watch we were slashing away to windward at a
fine rate, reeling off our eight knots per hour, with the royal stowed.
The breeze held all through the night, and when I went on deck at eight
o'clock on the following morning the cone that I had viewed through the
telescope on the previous evening was only some fifteen or sixteen miles
distant, broad on the weather bow, and the arrangement of white rocks on
the hill-side--five of them forming a vertical line--which the diary
assured me was the distinguishing mark by which I might identify the
spot for which I was searching--was clearly visible in the lenses of the
telescope, while the mouth of the estuary was about five miles ahead.

"Yes," I said to Enderby, who was standing beside