138 CORAL AND ATOLLS 



Darwin's stay in tlie atoll was a short one lasting only 

 ten days ; Forbes stayed for three weeks, and Guppy, who saw 

 far more than either of the two previous visitors, lived for ten 

 weeks with the Climies-Koss family. Neither Darwin nor 

 Forbes landed on the Keeling atollon, and its description by 

 Dr. Guppy was the first ever published — in fact Guppy was 

 the first scientific man who ever landed on the island ; and to 

 this day Keeling remains one of the spots least visited by men 

 that the world can still boast. 



THE SOUTHERN GROUP 



THE COCOS ATOLL PEOPER 



CALLED ON OLD CHARTS 



THE TRIANGULAR ISLANDS 



Some twenty-four islands enter into the composition of 

 the atoll ring ; twenty-three of these islands constitute a 

 horseshoe-shaped rim to the lagoon, and the twenty-fourth 

 lies in the gap of the horseshoe, where the lagoon com- 

 municates with the open sea. 



All these separate islands (with the exception of Pulu 

 Luar) rise from a common stratum of level coral breccia 

 rock — the barrier flat ; and this level stratum is in reality the 

 rim of the great reef that paves the bottom of the lagoon, and 

 falls away outside to the ocean depths. The rim of the reef is 

 some twenty-five miles in length, and a total of about seventeen 

 miles is covered by the dry land of the islands. The islands 

 vary in size from such considerable pieces of land as Pulu 

 Panjang — some six miles long and half a mile wide — to mere 

 mounds detached from other islands, or breccia masses heaped 

 on the barrier flats. The eight miles of the edge of the reef 

 that is not dry land varies in its nature in different parts of 

 the circumference, and these eight miles are the most 

 interesting miles of the whole of the atoll, for they still show 

 how the other seventeen miles have arrived at their present 

 condition — how, in fact, coral islands are made on the rock 



