Southwest from our tower lies all Polynesia, hundreds of leagues away; but straight west, on the precise line of his parallel, no land rises till your keel is beached upon the Kingsmills, a nice little sail of, say 5000 miles.

Having thus by such distant references—­with Rodondo the only possible ones—­settled our relative place on the sea, let us consider objects not quite so remote.  Behold the grim and charred Enchanted Isles.  This nearest crater-shaped headland is part of Albemarle, the largest of the group, being some sixty miles or more long, and fifteen broad.  Did you ever lay eye on the real genuine Equator?  Have you ever, in the largest sense, toed the Line?  Well, that identical crater-shaped headland there, all yellow lava, is cut by the Equator exactly as a knife cuts straight through the centre of a pumpkin pie.  If you could only see so far, just to one side of that same headland, across yon low dikey ground, you would catch sight of the isle of Narborough, the loftiest land of the cluster; no soil whatever; one seamed clinker from top to bottom; abounding in black caves like smithies; its metallic shore ringing under foot like plates of iron; its central volcanoes standing grouped like a gigantic chimney-stack.

Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors after a quite curious fashion.  A familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood: 

[Illustration]

Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and the middle transverse limb is Narborough, and all the rest is Albemarle.  Volcanic Narborough lies in the black jaws of Albemarle like a wolf’s red tongue in his open month.

If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in round numbers, the statistics, according to the most reliable estimates made upon the spot: 

Men, none. 
Ant-eaters, unknown. 
Man-haters, unknown. 
Lizards, 500,000. 
Snakes, 500,000. 
Spiders, 10,000,000. 
Salamanders, unknown. 
Devils, do. 
Making a clean total of 11,000,000,

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, and salamanders.

Albemarle opens his mouth towards the setting sun.  His distended jaws form a great bay, which Narborough, his tongue, divides into halves, one whereof is called Weather Bay, the other Lee Bay; while the volcanic promontories, terminating his coasts, are styled South Head and North Head.  I note this, because these bays are famous in the annals of the Sperm Whale Fishery.  The whales come here at certain seasons to calve.  When ships first cruised hereabouts, I am told, they used to blockade the entrance of Lee Bay, when their boats going round by Weather Bay, passed through Narborough channel, and so had the Leviathans very neatly in a pen.