from the sea, in some places overhanging their base, were tinted as by
Of thunder-shower,"
the hollow chasms between them being filled with gorgeous masses of purple-black shadow, under the sultry clouds which hung over the island. At the south-eastern extremity were two pointed, isolated rocks, probably a hundred feet high. We stood around the opposite extremity of the island, making for the port of Jamestown, which frees the north-west. The coast on this side rises into two bold heads, one of which projects outward like a gigantic capstan, while the other runs slantingly up to a pointed top, which is crowned with a signal station. The rock has a dark bluish-slate color, with streaks of a warm reddish-brown, and the strats, burst apart in the centre, yet slanting upward toward each other like the sides of a volcano, tell of upheaval by some tremendous subterranean agency. The structure of the island is purely volcanic, and, except the rock of Aden, on the coast of Arabia, I never saw a more forbidding spot.
The breeze increased as we drew near the island, but when we ran under the lee of the great cliffs, fell away almost entirely, so that we drifted lazily along within half a mile of them. At length a battery hove in sight, quarried in the face of the precipice, and anchored vessels, ono by one, came out behind the point. We stood off a little, urged along by occasional flaws of wind, and in a short time the shallow bight which forms the roadstead of St. Helena lay before us. There was another battery near at hand, at the foot of a deep, barren glen, called Rupert's Valley, from which a road, notched in the rock, leads around the intervening cliffs to the gorge, at the bottom of which Jamestown is built. A sea-wall across the mouth of this gorge, a row of ragged trees, weather-beaten by the gales of the Atlantic, and the spire of a church, were all that appeared of the town. The walls of the fort crowned the lofty cliff above, and high behind them towered the signal station, on the top of a conical peak, the loftiest in the island. The stone ladder which lends from the tower to the fort was marked on the face of the cliff like a white ribbon unrolled from its top. Inland, a summit covered with dark pine-trees, from the
