Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval

was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary

thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that

we were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the

attenuating darkness. Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit,

appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our

destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the

southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-

pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the

pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in

the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a

world of wonders.

Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or

knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues;

and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as

thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these

problematic shores. The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales;

it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty

modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was

crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues

deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the

articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial

canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was

no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.

Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our

haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-

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