I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not pass,
though I failed to see what had occasioned it. They seemed
to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed
in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet:
I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East.
They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin
faces at me,--faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes.
They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed
as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.
The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height,
sat a head below any one of the three. I found afterwards that really
none were taller than myself; but their bodies were abnormally long,
and the thigh-part of the leg short and curiously twisted.
At any rate, they were an amazingly ugly gang, and over the heads
of them under the forward lug peered the black face of the man whose
eyes were luminous in the dark. As I stared at them, they met my gaze;
and then first one and then another turned away from my direct stare,
and looked at me in an odd, furtive manner. It occurred to me that I
was perhaps annoying them, and I turned my attention to the island
we were approaching.

It was low, and covered with thick vegetation,--chiefly a kind of palm,
that was new to me. From one point a thin white thread of vapour rose
slantingly to an immense height, and then frayed out like a down feather.
We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on either
hand by a low promontory. The beach was of dull-grey sand,
and sloped steeply up to a ridge, perhaps sixty or seventy feet above
the sea-level, and irregularly set with trees and undergrowth.
Half way up was a square enclosure of some greyish stone, which I found
subsequently was built partly of coral and partly of pumiceous lava.