CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.
HOW THAT FISH MEANT MISCHIEF, AND BECAME MEAT.
Their way still led them along the peaceful waters which girt the island--for so they now felt that they might venture to call it--the strong barrier reef of coral keeping back the heaving swell of the ocean, which foamed and broke outside, leaving the lagoon perfectly calm, save here and there where they came across an opening in the reef through which a fleet might apparently have sailed into fairly deep anchorage, sheltered from the wildest storm and the roughest sea.
Here and there the reef was so far above water that vegetation had taken root, and young cocoa-nut trees were springing up to form the beginning of a grove, but for the most part there was the dead coral, the gleaming sand, and the pearly foam glistening in the sun.
No currents to stay them, no rough winds to check.

Their journey might have been upon some peaceful lake, whose left-hand shore was one succession of cocoa-nut groves; and beyond that, rocky jungle, full of ridge and hollow, mound of verdure, and darksome glade and chasm, down which trickled streams of water, such as had risen in the heights which culminated in the smoking cone of the volcano, while here and there the streams gave marked traces of their sources by sending up faint clouds of steam.
Mark felt as he lay back in the stern and gazed at the glorious panorama that he could watch the various phases of beauty in the landscape for ever.

But then he was not rowing, and the motion of the boat and the dipping of his hands in the water kept him comparatively cool.
Still, in spite of its beauty it was impossible to gaze shoreward without a feeling of awe.

For there had been that trembling of the earth; there were here and there openings in the trees through which vast blackened roads of rock seemed to come down to the sea, zigzag tracks which it was plain enough were the cooled-down and hardened streams of lava which had made their way to the sea during some eruption of the calmly beautiful mountain which rose so peacefully toward the clouds, one of which seemed to have remained to act as its feathery crown.
Then, too, there was the remembrance of that terrible roar which they had heard in the jungle, and every now and then Mark's eyes searched the trees at the edge beyond the sands, and he longed with a sensation of shrinking to catch sight of the creature which had given them all so much alarm.
But search how he would, as the boat went steadily on, there was no sign of animal life ashore but the birds.

Once or twice he fancied he could see something like a lizard run across the heated rocks, but he could not be sure.