Try for a moment to hold the picture; our little group standing on the
very crest of the mountain as if about to sing the final chorus of the
Creation to an audience of islands. Far-flung they stretched, these
jeweled confections, while below, almost at our very feet, we could
see the Kawa and Triplett, a tiny speck, frantically waving his
yard-arm! Even at three thousand feet he gave me a chill.... But let
Whinney speak.

"It is plain," he said, "that the basalt monadnock on which we stand
is a carboniferous upthrust of metamorphosed schists, shales and
conglomerate, probably Mesozoic or at least early Silurian."

At this point our wives burst into laughter. In fact, their attitude
throughout was trying but Whinney bravely proceeded.

"You doubtless noticed on the shore that the deep-lying metamorphic
crystals have been exposed by erosion, leaving on the upper levels
faulted strata of tilted lava-sheets interstratified with
pudding-stone."

"We have!" shouted Swank.

"Evidently then," continued the professor, "the atoll is simply an
annular terminal moraine of detritus shed alluvially into the sea,
thus leaving a geosyncline of volcanic ash embedded with an occasional
trilobite and the fragments of scoria, upon which we now stand."

[Illustration: William Henry Thomas]