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Updated: May 7, 2025
This is well exemplified in the case of Addoo, the southernmost atoll in the group, for although only nine miles in its longest diameter, it has a depth of thirty-nine fathoms, whereas all the other small atolls have comparatively shallow lagoons; I can assign no adequate cause for this difference in depth.
It is exactly as if the upheaving volcanic agencies had lifted up the edges of these great areas, while their centres had undergone a corresponding depression. An atoll area may, in short, be pictured as a kind of basin, the margins of which have been pushed up by the subterranean forces, to which the craters of the volcanoes have, at intervals, given vent.
I saw many of these shells thus embedded in the outer "flat" of Keeling atoll, which is composed of dead rock; and therefore the cavities in this case had no relation whatever with the growth of coral.
Thus the solitary observer noted that while two of them, some six miles apart, were simply extensive reefs of bare coral rock, with a multitude of narrow, intricate channels of water running hither and thither through them, the third some nine or ten miles to the southward was an atoll of very similar character to that of the pearl-island which they had so abruptly left on the preceding day, but considerably larger, quite an extensive grove of coco-palms growing upon it.
Evidently something was coming to visit the atoll; though it was certain nothing could be looking for us, as our capture could not then have been known, and there could have been no communication between the Maldives and Ceylon, or the mainland.
This spot, we thought, would make a good camp, as from it we commanded not only a good view of the lagoon, but of the sea to the south and west, and we felt certain that if Guest turned up all right, he would look for us at this end of the atoll even if he made it from the northward, and had to run the coast down. By supper time we had fixed ourselves up comfortably for the night.
Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious devil's dance. It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of unconsciousness. Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations. The noise of snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air.
And, finally, that if the relative level of the sea rise so much that the encircled land is completely submerged, the reef must necessarily pass into the condition of an atoll. For, suppose the relative level of the sea to remain stationary, after a fringing reef has reached that distance from the land at which the depth of water amounts to 150 feet.
I held it up to the light, but the shell was too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside; and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the rustle in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell. "Then came the atoll. Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly, close up to me.
And not only would this be the case, but we should find that for a considerable distance down, all the material of these atoll and encircling reefs was built up of precisely the same coral rock as the fringing reef. That is to say, you have an enormous mass of coral rock at a depth below the surface of the water where we know perfectly well that the coral animals could not have lived to form it.
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