“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 ended 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 gray-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?—­amby-theatre 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 about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down the channel.  Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.

“Not a human being in sight,” he repeated, and paused.

“I don’t know where they came from, not a bit.  And we were feeling so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.  I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet.  ‘Easy,’ says Always, ’there’s her mast.’  And after I’d had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught up the bogey, and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat round.  When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I shut the valve from the air-belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost—­for we hadn’t a ladder.  I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down into water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast.  I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a look-out at such a desolate place.  It stunk of solitude.