FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE 271 
this sensation never wore off, and that he still 
felt as fresh a sense of something extraordinary, 
at the sight of land, as upoh his first voyage. . 
To discover for one’s self that there is really 
another side to the ocean, —that is the aston- 
ishing thing. And when it happens, as in our 
case, that the haven thus gained is not merely 
a part of a great continent which the stupidest 
ship could not miss, if it only sailed far enough, 
but is actually a small volcanic island, a mere 
dot among those wild waves, a thing which one 
might easily have passed in the night, unsus- 
pecting, and which yet was not so passed, — it 
really seems like the maddest piece of good 
luck, as if one should go to sea in a bowl, hop- 
ing somewhere or other to land on the edge of 
a teacup. 
As next day we stumbled on deck in the 
foggy dawn, the dim island five miles off seemed 
only dawning too; a shapeless thing, half formed 
out of chaos, as if the leagues of gray ocean 
had grown weary of their eternal loneliness, 
and bungled into something solid at last. The 
phrase “making land” at once became the sim- 
ple and necessary expression; we had come 
upon the very process itself. Nearer still, the 
cliffs five hundred feet in height, and the bare 
conical hills of the interior, divided everywhere 
by cane hedges into a regular checker-work of 
