Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/407

Rh there are no streams, and most of the rain pools last but a few hours even after the heaviest shower. In some localities barren tracts of land are denuded, the rock cut to a sloping surface and whitewashed to serve as a watershed for collecting rain water in larger quantity than the roofs supply.

In addition to the garrisons and the marines there are on the islands about 18,000 people, two thirds of whom are negroes, the rest whites, mostly of English extraction. There is a property qualification for voting; the proportion of whites to blacks on the voting list is two to one, the reverse of the ratio in population.

The cities, as I have said, are but two: the quaint town of St. George's and the more modern town of Hamilton. St. George's is the more interesting because of its tortuous narrow streets, its high garden walls and its ancient architecture, which suggest a medieval European town (Fig. 6). It was the seat of government until about a hundred years ago (1815) and retained for a long time after that an importance due largely to its fine harbor.

The visible land of Bermuda gives a very incomplete idea of the shape of the submarine plateau from which it rises. If the sea were to recede so that its surface was about thirty feet below its present level, we should have a great oval lagoon some twenty-five miles long and from twelve to fifteen wide, the rim of which would be made up in part of the present land area, and for the rest of a more or less continuous reef of coral-covered rocks a mile or so wide (Map 1). The great central basin—the great north lagoon, as I have called it—would have no considerable depth—seldom more than fifteen or twenty feet of water, and nowhere more than thirty—and would be studded with innumerable coral rocks and islands. Some of the deeper parts have special names, as Murray Anchorage and Grassy Bay, while the shallower parts are known as flats—Brackish Pond Flats, Bailey's Bay Flats, etc. The passages through this rim would be only three: Hogfish Cut, Chub Cut and the Narrows or Ship Channel. The slope of the sea bottom outside the rim is rather abrupt on the southeast side of the oval, less so on the northwest side, and least of all at the ends, as the position of the hundred fathom line shows. Beyond the hundred fathom line the bottom slopes even more rapidly to a depth of