A cloud of birds! Now they fall to the water with close-clapped wings, hundreds at a time, each a tiny splashing fountain. Their hunger is insatiable, but not because food is lacking, for the swarms of pilchards beneath the waves are vaster than the armies of birds which pursue them. Ancient Indian races enriched their irrigated fields with these little fish. A curious, tawny jewel is found upon this shore, known as “fishes’ eyes.” Might they be fossilized eyes of those fertilizer-fishes? The appearance of this coast could not have been different in antediluvian days, with the screeching birds and the mammoth terrapin off-shore, those associates of the dodo. The birds fly out at sunrise and spend the day in fishing, resting upon the waves when they are tired, and at sunset return to their giant stone islands for the night. Alone, the call of a sea-bird would be lost in the fury of the meeting of cliff and sea. But as a mass of white gulls can assume blackness by mere quantity, so their mingled voices can take on an overwhelming poignancy of sound. Louder than the crash of breakers, louder than the barking and snorting of the bald, fat seals loping over them in droves, surges the great cry of the birds, as, in a shower of wild calls diverse as themselves, they settle upon the rocks: pelicans, cormorants, mollyhawks, gannets, sea-mews, gulls, osprey, occasional tropical flamingoes lost among ice-birds and stormy petrels, wild ducks, Inca terns, and the weird, amphibious “bird-child,” which tries to stand erect, fluttering its cartilaginous wings, braced by its indistinguishable tail. All the birds of the ocean gather here, from sandpeeps to albatrosses, a surfeit of life to accentuate the barrenness of the shore. They are multiplying every year their already limitless myriads, useless to man as the savages of the interior, without commercial value now of any kind, yet not annihilated on that account. It is said that all are souls of sailors lost at sea. In each stormy petrel a lost apprentice lives again, in each pelican a boatswain, in each mollyhawk a chief officer, in each albatross a sturdy old captain. One is tempted to write of the romance of the sea-birds of Peru, if romance has in it any of the fascination of waste on a large scale, for like barrenness, waste must be on a large scale to be picturesque. Where is the impertinence of it so overwhelming as in nature--her spendthrift production of unused powers, and the daring of her destruction? A German scientist, investigating the guano interests, reported eleven million birds on one of the Chincha Islands, for these are the guano birds, and these wild, craggy islands the Guano Islands, a jewel-casket of Peru, which now abandoned, emptied of its contents, stands wide open, staring vacant in the sunlight, that its owners may not forget its former fullness.