Читать книгу Into the Frozen South онлайн

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Cape Verde Islands greeted my sight this morning, looming dimly into view. By noon we were closing the coast, rugged and inhospitable. Absolutely nothing but bare rock was visible; sun-scorched and lacking entirely in verdure; bare rock rising majestically some fifteen hundred feet into the clear air, never a tree to break its monotony, apparently no soil in which a single blade of grass might grow. St. Vincent has few charms at the best; it is used for little else beyond a coaling station and a connecting link in the world’s submarine cable system. Rain seldom falls in St. Vincent, and it is too remote from the rest of the world to be fertilized by passing birds. Its harbour, though, is a fine, natural roadstead, being composed of an assortment of smaller islands, and the native divers beat anything I have ever come across, though they are reputed to be as light of finger as they are deft of movement in the water, and occasionally they are apt to become truculent and peevish if interrupted in their favourite hobby of abstracting such movables as they can lay hands on. Not that it was necessary for an article to be movable. I was solemnly assured by one who should have known that these same modern buccaneers had on one occasion endeavoured to steal the funnel out of the ship that harboured him!