If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take the following prescription.  Go three voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest frigate that floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the guides who conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many more respectively to a rope-dancer, an Indian juggler, and a chamois.  This done, come and be rewarded by the view from our tower.  How we get there, we alone know.  If we sought to tell others, what the wiser were they?  Suffice it, that here at the summit you and I stand.  Does any balloonist, does the outlooking man in the moon, take a broader view of space?  Much thus, one fancies, looks the universe from Milton’s celestial battlements.  A boundless watery Kentucky.  Here Daniel Boone would have dwelt content.

Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted Isles.  Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south.  You see nothing; but permit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of certain interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower’s base, we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole.

We stand now ten miles from the Equator.  Yonder, to the East, some six hundred miles, lies the continent; this Rock being just about on the parallel of Quito.

Observe another thing here.  We are at one of three uninhabited clusters, which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America.  In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of country.  Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan-Fernandez and Massafuero.  Of the first, it needs not here to speak.  The second lie a little above the Southern Tropic; lofty, inhospitable, and uninhabitable rocks, one of which, presenting two round hummocks connected by a low reef, exactly resembles a huge double-headed shot.  The last lie in the latitude of 33 deg.; high, wild and cloven.  Juan Fernandez is sufficiently famous without further description.  Massafuero is a Spanish name, expressive of the fact, that the isle so called lies more without, that is, further off the main than its neighbor Juan.  This isle Massafuero has a very imposing aspect at a distance of eight or ten miles.  Approached in one direction, in cloudy weather, its great overhanging height and rugged contour, and more especially a peculiar slope of its broad summits, give it much the air of a vast iceberg drifting in tremendous poise.  Its sides are split with dark cavernous recesses, as an old cathedral with its gloomy lateral chapels.  Drawing nigh one of these gorges from sea, after a long voyage, and beholding some tatterdemalion outlaw, staff in hand, descending its steep rocks toward you, conveys a very queer emotion to a lover of the picturesque.