Off Cape Sabine there are two islands, which I name Brevoort and Stalknecht; and another, midway between them and Wade Point, which I name Leconte. A deep inlet running parallel with the Cadogen Inlet of Captain Inglefield, fringed all around with glaciers set into the dark rocks like brilliants into a groundwork of jet, opens between Wade Point and Cape Isabella. I leave the naming of it until I see whether Inglefield has not a bay set down there, as I have not with me the official map of his explorations. Cape Isabella is a ragged mass of Plutonic rock, and looks as if it had been turned out of Nature's laboratory unfinished and pushed up from the sea while it was yet hot, to crack and crumble to pieces in the cold air. Its surface is barren to the last degree; immense chasms or cañons cross it in all directions, in which there was not the remotest trace of vegetation,--great yawning depths with jagged beds and crumbling sides,--sunless as the Cimerian caverns of Avernus. [Sidenote: A "DIAMOND OF THE DESERT."] As I clambered over crag after crag, I thought that I had not in the summer-time anywhere lit upon a place so devoid of life; but, as if to compensate for this barrenness, or through some freak of Nature, a charming cup-like valley nestled among the forbidding hills, and upon it I stumbled suddenly. Balboa could hardly have been more surprised when he climbed the hills of Darien and first saw the Pacific Ocean. It was truly a "Diamond of the Desert," and the little hermitage in the wilderness of Engadi was not a more pleasing sight to the Knight of the Couchant Leopard than was this to me. The few hardy plants which I had found in all other localities had failed to find a lodgment upon the craggy slopes of this rough cape, and the rocks stood up in naked barrenness, without the little fringe of vegetation which usually girdles them elsewhere; but down into this valley the seeds of life had been wafted; the grass and moss clothed it with green; and the poppies and buttercups sprinkled it over with leaves of gold. In its centre reposed a little sparkling lake, like a diamond in an emerald setting--a little "charmed sea," truly, "Girt by mountains wild and hoary;" and weird and wonderful as any that ever furnished theme for Norland legend.