"Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the fisherman, home from the sea; The hunter home from the hill." Here they rested, lulled by the eternal sigh of the ocean so long their home. The weather had scarcely improved when towards dawn we made a start for Isla de Mujeres. Had we known what was ahead of us, we should have made Sand Island our home for yet another day, till the sea had had time to quiet down. In the deep gloom which heralded the approach of another day we tacked round Cayo Sucio (Dirty Point) and passed Rat and Pelican Keys, two miniature isles. The sea was rough and choppy, and a mile or so out a nasty squall came up and we hove to, taking in all sail, the little boat pitching and tossing like a walnut shell, while we crouched under mackintosh sheets to keep as dry as was possible. Thence, when the sky cleared, we had a straight run down the coast. The amiable smuggler had ominously talked of a _via angusta_ (narrow way); but our Spanish was so limited that his explanations were lost on us, and his uneasiness, as he stared weatherwards, we took for the nervousness all Yucatecans show in any risk. It was about an hour after dawn that away to our left--so far that it sounded like the last thunder-mutterings of a storm long past--we heard a low murmuring. We looked seaward, and the captain pointed to the horizon with the words "_las rocas_." Across the dreary waste of water, its night-grey yielding to a sickly green in the chill morning glare, it was at first hard to see anything. Then, as we stared, we saw at first a long, thin, black line, white-topped, starting leftwards some five miles off and running in till its end was lost in the rollers ahead. Evenly marked it seemed, like the black and white painting on a giant ship's hull. And then, in the minutes as we neared, the white became broken into cloudlets, showing up quick in succession like smoke of an engine above the edge of a railway cutting. And quickly the murmuring turned into a booming, like the hum of a great city's traffic heard from afar; and the booming into a low intense thunder. And as we passed into the tumbling waters, the even lines were gone and we saw an endless belt of black coral rock closing our whole horizon. The "Esperanza" was heading for the reef at seven knots. We ran to within half a mile; and the thunder of the Atlantic, as it broke upon the demon-shaped jags of coral, bursting in clouds of spray forty feet high, was like the dry roaring of wild beasts. The tiller went round, and we veered a point or two more into the wind; and then straight ahead we saw why the amiable smuggler had steered up so close. To our right a smaller line of reef, some two hundred yards long, bent out from the shore to meet the three-mile leftward curve. Between the shore and the coral was no safe way even for boats of three feet draught such as ours. Ahead lay the only way--between the deadly corals.