Page 130 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and
moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and
noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and
fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around
breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a per-
petual frown. The shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to
the summit of basalt cliffs, or the ironed convict, dragging
his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling plateau, looks
down upon a sea of fog, through which rise mountain-tops
like islands; or sees through the biting sleet a desert of scrub
and crag rolling to the feet of Mount Heemskirk and Mount
Zeehan—crouched like two sentinel lions keeping watch
over the seaboard.

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