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The sun was blazing hot, and on the broad, glassy expanse of the slumbering atoll a dim, misty haze, like the last vanishing vapours of a sea fog in some cold northern clime, hovered low down upon the water; for early in the day the trade wind had died away in faint, warm gusts, and left the island and the still lagoon to swelter under the fierce rays of an all but equatorial sun.
The Chagos group appears from some cause, possibly from the subsidence having been too rapid, at present to be much less favourably circumstanced for the growth of reefs than formerly: one atoll has a portion of its marginal reef, nine miles in length, dead and submerged; a second has only a few quite small living points which rise to the surface, a third and fourth are entirely dead and submerged; a fifth is a mere wreck, with its structure almost obliterated.
Captain Moresby believes the rim consists of dead rock, thinly covered with sand, and he is certain this is the case with the external rim of the Great Chagos Bank, which is also essentially a submerged atoll.
If then the foundations, whence the atoll- building corals sprang, were not formed of sediment, and if they were not lifted up to the required level, they must of necessity have subsided into it; and this at once solves the difficulty. For as mountain after mountain, and island after island, slowly sank beneath the water, fresh bases would be successively afforded for the growth of the corals.
The return journey was uneventful, except in so far as it showed them that the boats were loaded quite as deeply as was desirable for the safe negotiation of that part of the passage which lay to windward of the atoll; and when once they were safely inside the lagoon, they proceeded straight to the spot already chosen by them for the purpose, and discharged their cargoes into the shallow basin of rock.
'Very well, said Burton, an hour later, to Von Hammer, 'you can take him. I don't want the brute here. But he is a dangerous devil, mind. Where do you say he comes from? 'Onêata Saint David's Island a little bit of a sandy atoll, as big as Manono over there, and much like it, too. I know the place well lived there once when I was pearling, ten years ago.
I took the egg ashore and put it in a good place, well above the tide lines and in the sun, to give it all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed about prospecting. It's rum how dull an atoll is. As soon as I had found a spring all the interest seemed to vanish.
Now I must explain: Apaian Lagoon is a vast atoll completely enclosed on the eastern and southern sides by a low, narrow strip of land, densely covered with coco-palms, and on the northern and western by a continuous chain of tiny islets connected by the reef.
I'm anxious to get to Lattimore!" We Reach the Atoll. So we journeyed on to Duluth, to St. Paul and Minneapolis, and to the cities on the Missouri. It was at one of those recurrent periods when the fever of material and industrial change and development breaks out over the whole continent.
Fifty years passed ere this lonely atoll was visited by another ship, and then American and English whalers, or, as they were called in those days, 'South Seamen, began to touch at the island, give their crews a few days' spell amid the grateful shade of the palm grove and load their boats to the gunwales with fat green turtle, turtle eggs, robber crabs, and sea-birds' eggs.
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