sit to the spot was made in the gray of the morning. With a
view of fishing, we had lowered three boats and pulling some two miles
from our vessel, found ourselves just before dawn of day close under the
moon-shadow of Rodondo. Its aspect was heightened, and yet softened, by
the strange double twilight of the hour. The great full moon burnt in
the low west like a half-spent beacon, casting a soft mellow tinge upon
the sea like that cast by a waning fire of embers upon a midnight
hearth; while along the entire east the invisible sun sent pallid
intimations of his coming. The wind was light; the waves languid; the
stars twinkled with a faint effulgence; all nature seemed supine with
the long night watch, and half-suspended in jaded expectation of the
sun. This was the critical hour to catch Rodondo in his perfect mood.
The twilight was just enough to reveal every striking point, without
tearing away the dim investiture of wonder.

From a broken stair-like base, washed, as the steps of a water-palace,
by the waves, the tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven
summit. These uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most
peculiar feature. For at their lines of junction they project flatly
into encircling shelves, from top to bottom, rising one above another in
graduated series. And as the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive
with swallows, so were all these rocky ledges with unnumbered sea-fowl.
Eaves upon eaves, and nests upon nests. Here and there were long
birdlime streaks of a ghostly white staining the tower from sea to air,
readily accounting for its sail-like look afar. All would have been
bewitchingly quiescent, were it not for the demoniac din created by the
birds. Not only were the eaves rustling with them, but they flew densely
overhead, spreading themselves into a winged and continually shifting
canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic birds for hundreds of leagues
around. To the north, to the east, to the west, stretches nothing but
eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war hawk coming from the coasts of
North America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first land at Rodondo. And
yet though Rodondo be terra-firma, no land-bird ever lighted on it.
Fancy a red-robin or a canary there! What a falling into the hands of
the Philistines, when the poor warbler should be surrounded by such
locust-flights of strong bandit birds, with long bills cruel as daggers.

I know not where one can better study the Natu