I clothed myself in a breathless hurry, and, coming out, found Mr. Bates at the wheel and Will on the bulwarks, looking ahead, and Tom on the deck-house roof, pointing the brig’s telescope at the sea. The morning was bright and silent. A light north-easterly wind held the canvas hushed. Long lines of swell were flowing out of the south-east. For leagues northward and eastward the sea was full of the light of the sun. I looked directly ahead, and instantly beheld a large, dim, violet cloud upon the horizon. ‘Is that Tristan d’Acunha, Tom?’ ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, turning quickly. ‘That’s our island, Marian.’ ‘A noble hiding-place!’ I cried. Indeed, that point of shadowy land lying upon the mighty face of the deep was such a revelation of loneliness that, when you viewed it and thought of the measureless leagues of ocean stretching from it west to the South Pacific, east to the Australian meridians, you thought that here only in this prodigious liquid waste was earth’s deepest, wildest, most awful secret of solitude to be learned and solved. Tom’s eyes were upon me. He brought his face close and whispered, ‘They’ll never think of us as being there.’ ‘It’s as lonely as a star.’ ‘We’ll be getting a better view presently. I hope there’s nothing lying off. If there is, I’ll push on and heave-to behind the horizon till I think it’s gone.’ ‘Is there a harbour, Tom?’ ‘Oh, no,’ he replied, with a shake of his head and a faint smile. ‘No other harbour than a two-mile offing. That heap is about eight thousand feet tall. You see but a little of it. The mass from midway’ll be wrapped up in a cloud. The inshore wind strikes and rebounds in offshore gales. I’ll not leave the brig. They’ll put off, and if they’ll lend me two or three hands to work us, then, after I’ve introduced Glass to you, if he’s well enough to board us--and spun my yarn to him with you as the only listener’--and here he glanced at Will, who still overhung the rail, looking ahead--‘we’ll proceed.’ I did not ask where to; we had talked the thing over and over again, and the four of us were agreed that nothing could be settled till we were off the island and saw how affairs stood there. It was just possible that a missionary parson had settled in Tristan since Tom’s visit; in that case we could be made man and wife out of hand and so spared a new voyage in search of a church. Then, again, nothing could be decided until we knew that the islanders would lend us two or three of themselves to help work the brig.