It seemed only a mountain of mud standing up out of the dull mists of the sea.

But as we bore down upon it the sun came out and made it a beautiful picture--a mass of green farms and meadows that swelled up to a height of fifteen hundred feet and mingled its upper outlines with the clouds.

It was ribbed with sharp, steep ridges and cloven with narrow canyons, and here and there on the heights, rocky upheavals shaped themselves into mimic battlements and castles; and out of rifted clouds came broad shafts of sunlight, that painted summit, and slope and glen, with bands of fire, and left belts of somber shade between.

It was the aurora borealis of the frozen pole exiled to a summer land! We skirted around two-thirds of the island, four miles from shore, and all the opera glasses in the ship were called into requisition to settle disputes as to whether mossy spots on the uplands were groves of trees or groves of weeds, or whether the white villages down by the sea were really villages or only the clustering tombstones of cemeteries.

Finally we stood to sea and bore away for San Miguel, and Flores shortly became a dome of mud again and sank down among the mists, and disappeared.