The day after we took fish at the base of this Round Tower, we had a fine wind, and shooting round the north headland, suddenly descried a fleet of full thirty sail, all beating to windward like a squadron in line.  A brave sight as ever man saw.  A most harmonious concord of rushing keels.  Their thirty kelsons hummed like thirty harp-strings, and looked as straight whilst they left their parallel traces on the sea.  But there proved too many hunters for the game.  The fleet broke up, and went their separate ways out of sight, leaving my own ship and two trim gentlemen of London.  These last, finding no luck either, likewise vanished; and Lee Bay, with all its appurtenances, and without a rival, devolved to us.

The way of cruising here is this.  You keep hovering about the entrance of the bay, in one beat and out the next.  But at times—­not always, as in other parts of the group—­a racehorse of a current sweeps right across its mouth.  So, with all sails set, you carefully ply your tacks.  How often, standing at the foremast head at sunrise, with our patient prow pointed in between these isles, did I gaze upon that land, not of cakes, but of clinkers, not of streams of sparkling water, but arrested torrents of tormented lava.

As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough presents its side in one dark craggy mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet, at which point it hoods itself in heavy clouds, whose lowest level fold is as clearly defined against the rocks as the snow-line against the Andes.  There is dire mischief going on in that upper dark.  There toil the demons of fire, who, at intervals, irradiate the nights with a strange spectral illumination for miles and miles around, but unaccompanied by any further demonstration; or else, suddenly announce themselves by terrific concussions, and the full drama of a volcanic eruption.  The blacker that cloud by day, the more may you look for light by night.  Often whalemen have found themselves cruising nigh that burning mountain when all aglow with a ball-room blaze.  Or, rather, glass-works, you may call this same vitreous isle of Narborough, with its tall chimney-stacks.

Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we cannot see all the other isles, but it is a good place from which to point out where they lie.  Yonder, though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant dusky ridge.  It is Abington Isle, one of the most northerly of the group; so solitary, remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man’s Land seen off our northern shore.  I doubt whether two human beings ever touched upon that spot.  So far as yon Abington Isle is concerned, Adam and his billions of posterity remain uncreated.