THE BIRTH OF A VOLCANO 119 



The next thought brought a gasp and a leap of 

 my pulse, — a volcano! "I think so," said my stolid 

 friend, to whose sailor mind land and sea were 

 phenomena only to be approached, passed over and 

 left behind. I turned and saw the dim loom of the 

 cliffs above me — so cold in the starlight, and the 

 thought of their beginnings took on a sense of 

 reality; there might be beginnings today. 



Time after time I awoke and looked at the pink 

 blur, and once a great shooting star fell slantingly 

 into the very heart of the warm glow. It paled and 

 vanished in the dawn. 



My first selfish thought was to stop scientific 

 work, drop everything and steam swiftly toward 

 the strange sight, — the exact effect of a fire alarm 

 on a school-boy. Then I found good and reason- 

 able excuses. The thing itself was well worth veri- 

 fication, and the unexpected trip would interfere 

 not at all with my oceanographic work. We did 

 not wait even to hoist our flock of boats aboard, 

 but towed them ashore, dragged them to the top of 

 the beach and left them in the shade of the tent 

 flies. 



The captain said that the direction of the light 

 was 256° of the compass circle, a bit of news which 

 was utterly unintelligible until correlated with the 

 more old-fashioned, visuable west-by-south-by-one- 

 half-south. Eagerly I laid down a ruler on the 

 Galapagos chart westward from Tower, and eighty 

 miles away it came to rest on Albemarle. It 

 touched the island far north of the five thousand- 

 foot southernmost peak which on the chart was 



