OUR ISLANDS 159 



terious beam of light fell across a snow-white dais. 



Rider Haggard could have done no better. As 

 we stood stock-still hardly venturing to breathe, 

 the consciousness of things moving quietly all 

 about us was conveyed by more than the sense of 

 actual hearing. Soft sighs, the rustle of a dis- 

 placed pebble, a queer sibilant little sound between 

 a breath and a hiss, peopled the gloom and sent 

 tingles up and down our spines. Wild thoughts 

 raced through our minds, — gnomes, mermaids, 

 strange island folk of unhuman ancestry, or some- 

 thing too weird to imagine with even so much defi- 

 niteness. Then a warm, wet nose sniffed experi- 

 mentally around our ankles, and almost before we 

 had time to realize that our cave trolls were sea- 

 lions, and the white throne a wave-washed pile of 

 pebbles and coral, there was a clatter and tinkle 

 of stones, like faint cymbals and timbrels, and into 

 the beam of light across the pale divan came the 

 biggest sea-lion I ever saw. The circumstances 

 and surroundings conspired to make him even 

 larger than he would have seemed in daylight, I 

 suppose, but he was assuredly the great-grand- 

 father and the king of all his kind. 



He advanced to the exact center of the spotlight 

 and posed there. It seemed as though some one 

 ought to cry "Oyez! Oyez!" but the only sounds 

 were the subdued sighs under our feet and further 

 back in unseen recesses the sibilant noises made by 

 suckling pups. 



The chamber was partially divided by a low wall 

 running down the middle and we leaned on this 



