"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,
you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where
the Ocean Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy
grey rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had
to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was
a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just
as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts
that was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in
all coming in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday
morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.
It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People
over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore
and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance,
wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined
by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps,
with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving
upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear,
and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting
things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools
and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after
the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way
forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay
in the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour