The truth was, that although I hadn't seen what like the land was, and couldn't have said, by the chart, _where_ we were, I began to have a faint notion of whereabouts we possibly soon might be, from what I remembered hearing an old quartermaster in the Iris say, a couple of years before, regarding a particular spot on the south-west coast, where the currents at some seasons, as he phrased it, made a regular race-course meeting. The old fellow gave me also, at the time, some bearings of the nearest coast, with the landmarks at the mouth of a river a little farther north--which, he said, he would know if you set him down there of a dark night, though he had been in his bed at Gosport the minute before, if there was just a right streak of sky to the eastward--namely, a big black rock like two steps, and a block at the foot of them, somewhat the shape of a chipped holy-stone, running down on one side out of a high headland, like an admiral's cocked hat, with six mop-headed trees upon the root of the rock, for all the world like hairs on a wart. Here I recollected how my worthy authority pointed modestly for example to a case of the kind on his own nose. The opposite shore of its mouth was flat, with a heavy white surf; but it shut in so far upon the other, he said, that, steering from the south'ard, one would never know there was a river there at all. The Bambar he called it; but if he meant the Bembarooghe, we could scarcely be near _it_, or that much toward being abreast of St Helena. For all I saw, indeed, we might have nothing to eastward of us save a hard coast, or else the sandy coast farther down, shoaling out of sight of land! At any rate I knew we must have got into the tail of the great sea-stream from round the Cape of Good Hope, which would, no doubt, split out at sea on Viana's Bank, and turn partly to north-eastward thereabouts; so that it wasn't a very bad guess to suppose we were getting up somewhere near Cape Frio, the likeliest place in the world to find old Bob Martin's "maze," which we used to joke about so in the Iris.