ROUGH GOING. 



107 



where form a thick canopy above them. The ridges 

 between them are more or less flat-topped but desperately 

 bare and jagged ; so that wherever possible we were glad 

 to jump down and walk along the bottom of the troughs. 



Little Swan Island is, in fact, a big " stack " of solid 

 coral limestone which has been thrust bodily up from the 

 sea bottom. Its homogeneous coral rock does not exhibit 

 any very obvious traces of the coral organisms which 

 originally were answerable for it, such, for instance, as 

 one sees so beautifully in the series of raised terraces on 

 the Island of Barbados. The rock, wherever it is not 

 covered with soil, is so hard that it rings like iron. If 

 you look over the tops of the cli£Es which fall plumb to 

 the sea on the southern side, they seem one solid uniform 

 wall of finely-grained rock, chiselled and grooved and 

 hollowed out, in those places where it is softer than 

 others, by the fretful restless waves beneath. At the 

 level of the water-line, and some little way down from 

 this into the clear depths at the base of the cliffs, the rock 

 has not suffered so much from the w^eathering influences 

 of wind, rain and thudding waves ; but it is polished and 

 pink from an encrusting coating of mxllipoies {Litho- 

 thamnion) which have been worn smooth by the constant 

 rise and fall of the water. 



Returning to the curious channels with which the 

 western end of the island is seamed : it was not difficult 

 to picture the time when through them sluiced quickly- 

 running currents of limpid sea-water, and when sea-fans 

 grew in thick clusters on their bottom and chitons and 

 long-spined sea-urchins clung to their vv^ater-worn sides. 

 Now they are raised sixty feet above the sea, and the 

 leaves from forest trees, the seeds of whose long dead 

 ancestors were dropped here by storm-driven birds, 

 have been failing and falling through the long ages and 

 decomposing into the mould which threatens to obliterate 

 all traces of them. 



Had we been less inclined to take care of our boots, 

 which, as a matter of fact, were horribly new and green, 



