"There's no one about, sir, that I can see," said he, wisely, "and no lights in the houses either. I wonder where all the people are? It's curious that we shouldn't see some one." He put it as a kind of question; but before I could answer him Seth Barker chimed in with his deep voice, and pointed towards the distant reef: "They've lit up the sea, that's what they've done," said he. "By thunder, they have!" cries Peter Bligh, in his astonishment; "and generous about it, too. Saw any one such a thing as that?" He indicated the distant reef, which seemed, as I bear witness, ablaze with lights. And not only the reef, mark you, but the sea about it, a cable's length, it may be, to the north and the south, shone like a pool of fire, yellow and golden, and sometimes with a rare and beautiful green light when the darkness deepened. Such a spectacle I shall never see again if I sail a thousand ships! That luscious green of the rolling seas, the spindrift tossed in crystals of light, foam running on the rocks, but foam like the water of jewels, a dazzling radiance--aye, a very carpet of quivering gold. Of this had they made the northern channel. How it was done, what cleverness worked it, it needed greater brains than mine to say. I was for all the world like a man struck dumb with the beauty of something which pleases and awes him in the same breath. "Lights under the sea, and people living there! It's enough to make a man doubt his senses," said I. "And yet the thing's true, lads: we're sane men and waking; it isn't a story-book. You can prove it for yourselves." "Aye, and men going in and out like landsmen to their houses," cried Peter, almost breathless; "it's a fearsome sight, captain, a fearsome sight, upon my word." The rest of us said nothing. We were just a little frightened group that stared open-mouthed upon a seeming miracle. If we regarded the things we saw with a seaman's reverence, let no one make complaint of that. The spectacle was one to awe any man; nor might we forget that those who appeared to live below the sea lived there, as Ruth Bellenden had told us, because the island was a death-trap. We were in the trap and none to show us the road out. "Peter," said I, suddenly, for I wished to turn their thoughts away from it, "are you forgetting it's dinner-time?" "I clean forgot, captain, by all that's holy," said he. "And not feeling very hungry, either," exclaims Dolly Venn, who had begun to cough in the steaming vapour, which we laughed at. I was anxious about the lad already, and it didn't comfort me to hear Seth Barker breathing like an ox and telling me that it should be clearer in the valley.