Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/102

90 Horns. This, the haunt of innumerable, skirling seafowl, went down on the chart as "Plover Bay."

Now, with the spring again as the starting point, his knife swung to the West, past the limestone cliffs of Coral Cove (just west of the capes) to the great "Cave of Night," two miles and three-quarters, as the crow flies, from his home. Its roof, at least sixty feet high, was plastered all over with nests like those of martins, but larger and only dimly descried. Through the eternal darkness sounded the strange cries of nightbirds, whose wheeling bodies melted into the inky blackness of the vault until they became mere flitting pairs of eyes.

Fleeing this ghoulish aviary, he hurried home, and on the following morning took his most extensive tour, through the heart of the island, due south from the hut.

Leaving the coral-tinted beach and its border of feather-topped pines, he passed through acres of sworded thicket, then the rich foliage of several successive terraces, prolific with mangoes, oranges, limes, nutmegs, and other once cultivated fruits, all mingling with the wild and giving evidence that long ago beings of his own kind had dwelt in this beautiful, forgotten fragment of the earth.

As he ascended, over him towered gigantic trees,—mahogany, dye, and fine cabinet woods, and everywhere, criss crossing between their mighty boles, stretched like a maze of ship s ropes the stout liana vines. Their roots were covered by an even more impenetrable labyrinth of weed, and bush, and hidden trailer, all as riotous in colour as in their bewildering disorder. The sombreness of the trees was richly tinted