climbing them--walls you might call them, a good hundred feet high, and
widening gradually towards the top, but in a circle as regular as ever
you could draw with a pair of compasses. Any fool could see what had
happened--that here was the crater of a dead volcano, one side of which
had been broken into by the sea; but the beauty of it, sir, coming on
top of my weakness, fairly made me cry. For the walls at the top were
fringed with palms and jungle trees, and hung with creepers like
curtains that trailed over the face of the cliff and down among the
ferns by the shore. I leaned over the boat and stared into the water.
It was clear, clear--you've no notion how clear; but no bottom could I
see. It seemed to sink right through and into the sea on the other side
of the world!

"Well, all this was mighty pretty, but it didn't tell me where to find a
meal; so I baled out the boat and paddled along the eastern edge of the
lake searching the cliffs for a path, and after an hour or so I hit on
what looked to me like a foot-track, zig-zagging up through the creepers
and across the face of the rock. I determined to try it, made the boat
fast to a clump of fern, slung O'Hara's cornet on to my side-belt and
began to climb.

"I saw no marks of footsteps; but the track was a path all right, though
a teazer. A dozen times I had to crawl on hands and knees under the
creepers--creepers with stems as thick as my two wrists--and once, about
two-thirds of the way up, I was forced to push sideways through a
crevice dripping with water, and so steep under foot that I slid twice
and caked myself with mud. I very nearly gave out here; but it was do
or die, and after ten minutes more of scratching, pushing, and
scrambling, I reached the top and sat down to mop my face and recover.