Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/105

93 tion,—a half-rotting suspension bridge, built of liana vines. He essayed the passage fearfully. The frail structure swayed above the cataract's thunder, but he reached the other side in safety, and climbed to the summit of the mountain. From a distance it had seemed a perfect blue cone, but here the explorer saw that a few thousand feet had been decapitated or blown away by some volcanic eruption, leaving a little seething, sulphurous lake, shaped like a saucer with brown and yellow, cliff-like sides, and properly recorded on the map as "Davy Jones' Saucer."

The boy turned his face away from the mountain, and gazed over the beauty of The Isle of Green Stairways and far away over the surrounding blue radiance of the ocean, but there was no cheering touch of white to tell a sail, or any smudge of steamer smoke to mar its purity.

A little later, in the twilight, he descended, vastly depressed, to the hut, and fell asleep.

On the following week he again made the journey through Cathedral Woods to Cone Mountain, and this time saw, leagues to the Northeast, the longed-for smoke on the horizon rim. Frantically he built huge fires, but in an hour the smoke had melted into thin air.

If he had had a powerful glass instead of the one broken lens, he might have seen a trim schooner yacht with a Bohemian party aboard, bound on a cruise of the West Indies. From the deck of the yacht, the owner and skipper saw the smoke of Ben's signal fires, but fancied it the vapour of some inactive volcano. Though they sailed away, one of the party all unconsciously performed a service for the