224 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



rose before us tiny and mountainous, only about 

 three and a half niiles across, with two peaks in 

 sight, deep-seamed with ravines, one of which was 

 almost twenty-eight hundred feet in height. Here 

 and there off shore were a scattering of rocky 

 islets, but, as we later fomid, the bottom of the 

 sea dropped abruptly downward in all directions. 

 No greater contrast could be imagined than be- 

 tween Cocos and the Galapagos — the one wet and 

 green, the others dry and brown. 



Night came quickly, dark, with swift scudding 

 clouds and an occasional hint of subdued moonlight. 

 Hoarse, disembodied cries drifted down through 

 the night, and the restless waters of Chatham Bay 

 lapped along our vessel, as jungle grass brushes 

 against the sides of a smoothly moving elephant. 



Dawn broke with the silent impetus of the trop- 

 ics, and breakfast on this day lost all hint of a social 

 rite, and became a hastily performed physiological 

 necessity. 



Our atavistic pirate threw his tiny Panama dug- 

 out and paddle overboard, dived after, baled it, 

 crawled in, and sped shoreward, in the same spirit 

 with which a pilgrim comes within sight of the 

 Kaaba. No devotee ever climbed the seventy-two 

 steps of St. Anne de Beaupre with more reverence 

 than Don Dickerman, tumbled ashore by the break- 

 ers, crept up the pebbly beach. 



I followed quickly and our little outboard motor 

 vibrated rapidly across the bay. Great shadowy 

 forms passed beneath, and now and then we had to 

 snap the tiny propeller out of water as a giant 



