Mechanically she picked up a stick at her feet.  It was the sailor’s wand of investigation.  He snatched it from her hands and threw it away among the trees.

“That is a dangerous alpenstock,” he said.  “The wood is unreliable.  It might break.  I will cut you a better one,” and he swung the axe against a tall sapling.

Iris mentally described him as “funny.”  She followed him in the upward curve of the ascent, for the grade was not difficult and the ground smooth enough, the storms of years having pulverized the rock and driven sand into its clefts.  The persistent inroads of the trees had done the rest.  Beyond the flight of birds and the scampering of some tiny monkeys overhead, they did not disturb a living creature.

The crest of the hill was tree-covered, and they could see nothing beyond their immediate locality until the sailor found a point higher than the rest, where a rugged collection of hard basalt and the uprooting of some poon trees provided an open space elevated above the ridge.

For a short distance the foothold was precarious.  Jenks helped the girl in this part of the climb.  His strong, gentle grasp gave her confidence.  She was flushed with exertion when they stood together on the summit of this elevated perch.  They could look to every point of the compass except a small section on the south-west.  Here the trees rose behind them until the brow of the precipice was reached.

The emergence into a sunlit panorama of land and sea, though expected, was profoundly enthralling.  They appeared to stand almost exactly in the center of the island, which was crescent-shaped.  It was no larger than the sailor had estimated.  The new slopes now revealed were covered with verdure down to the very edge of the water, which, for nearly a mile seawards, broke over jagged reefs.  The sea looked strangely calm from this height.  Irregular blue patches on the horizon to south and east caught the man’s first glance.  He unslung the binoculars he still carried and focused them eagerly.

“Islands!” he cried, “and big ones, too!”

“How odd!” whispered Iris, more concerned in the scrutiny of her immediate surroundings.  Jenks glanced at her sharply.  She was not looking at the islands, but at a curious hollow, a quarry-like depression beneath them to the right, distant about three hundred yards and not far removed from the small plateau containing the well, though isolated from it by the south angle of the main cliff.

Here, in a great circle, there was not a vestige of grass, shrub, or tree, nothing save brown rock and sand.  At first the sailor deemed it to be the dried-up bed of a small lake.  This hypothesis would not serve, else it would be choked with verdure.  The pit stared up at them like an ominous eye, though neither paid further attention to it, for the glorious prospect mapped at their feet momentarily swept aside all other considerations.