Ere ascending, however, to gaze abroad upon the Encantadas, this sea-tower itself claims attention.  It is visible at the distance of thirty miles; and, fully participating in that enchantment which pervades the group, when first seen afar invariably is mistaken for a sail.  Four leagues away, of a golden, hazy noon, it seems some Spanish Admiral’s ship, stacked up with glittering canvas.  Sail ho!  Sail ho!  Sail ho! from all three masts.  But coming nigh, the enchanted frigate is transformed apace into a craggy keep.

My first visit 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.