Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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“We sighted the island soon after sunrise, and at noon were abreast of it. It was a very remarkable heap of rock, much after the pattern of the Galapagos, gloomy with black lava, and the land consisted of masses of broken lava, compacted into cliffs and small conical hills, that reminded me somewhat of the Island of Ascension. I examined it very carefully with a telescope and beheld trees and vegetation in one place, but no signs of human life—no signs of any sort of life, if it were not for a number of turtle or tortoises crawling upon the beach and looking like ladybirds in the distance. But, as we slowly drew past the island, we opened a sort of natural harbor formed by two long lines of reef, one of them incurving as though it was a pier and the handiwork of man. The front of cliff that overlooked this natural harbor was very lofty, and in the middle of it was a tremendous fissure—a colossal cave—the shape of the mouth like the sides of a roughly-drawn letter A. Inside this cave ’twas as dark as evening; yet I seemed with my glass to obscurely behold something within. I looked and looked, and then handed the telescope to the mate, who said there was something inside the cave. It resembled to his fancy the scaffolding of a building, but what it exactly was neither of us could make out.