We lingered long, filling our eyes with beauty:  and then rowed away.  What more was to be done?  Through that very chasm we were to have passed out to the cave.  And yet the sight of this delicious nook repaid us—­so more than one of the party thought—­for our disappointment.  There was another Guacharo cave in the Monos channel, more under the lee.  We would try that to-morrow.

As the sun sank that evening, we sat ourselves upon the eastern rocks, and gazed away into the pale, sad, boundless west; while Venus hung high, not a point, as here, but a broad disc of light, throwing a long gleam over the sea.  Fish skipped over the clear calm water; and above, pelicans—­the younger brown, the older gray—­ wheeled round and round in lordly flight, paused, gave a sudden half-turn, then fell into the water with widespread wings, and after a splash, rose with another skipjack in their pouch.  As it grew dark, dark things came trooping over the sea, by twos and threes, then twenty at a time, all past us toward a cave near by.  Birds we fancied them at first, of the colour and size of starlings; but they proved to be bats, and bats, too, which have the reputation of catching fish.  So goes the tale, believed by some who see them continually, and have a keen eye for nature; and who say that the bat sweeps the fish up off the top of the water with the scoop-like membrane of his hind-legs and tail.  For this last fact I will not vouch.  But I am assured that fish scales were found, after I left the island, in the stomachs of these bats; and that of the fact of their picking up small fish there can be no doubt.  ‘You could not,’ says a friend, ’be out at night in a boat, and hear their continual swish, swish, in the water, without believing it.’  If so, the habit is a quaint change of nature in them; for they belong, I am assured by my friend Professor Newton, not to the insect-eating, but to the fruit-eating family of bats, who, in the West as in the East Indies, may be seen at night hovering round the Mango-trees, and destroying much more fruit than they eat.

So we sat watching the little dark things flit by, like the gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it is best nowadays not to write; till it was time to feel our way indoors, by such light as Venus gave, over the slippery rocks, and then, cautiously enough, past the Manchineel {107} bush, a broken sprig of which would have raised an instant blister on the face or hand.