MY ISLANDS. 8 



craters and its red-hot ash-cones pushed gradually up, 

 century after century, from the deep blue waters of the 

 Mid-Miocene ocean. 



All round my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a 

 depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms ; indeed, 

 in some parts between the group and Portugal the plum- 

 met of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have 

 often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500 ; and out of 

 this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up 

 my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose 

 topmost summits alone stood out bit by bit above the 

 level of the surrounding sea. One of them, the most 

 abrupt and cone-like, by name now Pico, rises to this 

 day, a magnificent sight, sheer seven thousand feet 

 into the sky from the placid sheet that girds it round 

 on every side. You creatures of to-day, approaching it 

 in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-driven canoes 

 that you call steamers, must admire immensely its 

 conical peak, as it stands out silhouetted against the 

 glowing horizon in the deep red glare of a sub-tropical 

 Atlantic sunset. 



But when I, from my solitary aerial perch, saw my 

 islands rise bare and massive first from the water's edge, 

 the earliest idea that occurred to me as an investigator of 

 nature was simply this : how will they ever get clad with 

 soil and herbage and living creatures ? So naked and 

 barren were their black crags and rocks of volcanic slag, 

 that I could hardly conceive how they could ever come 

 to resemble the other smiling oceanic islands which I 

 looked down upon in my flight from day to day over so 

 many wide and scattered oceans. I set myself to watch, 



