Aft, the top of the cabin skylight had been covered with a white cloth and improvised as a table, on which were spread some of the luscious fruits and sliced water-melon bought from the Malay, Puffadder, and a bottle or two of the captain's best wine.
Then, that music might not be wanting, Ethel and Rose, uniting their clear, sweet, happy voices, while Heriot accompanied them on his flute, which he played to perfection, sang one of their favourite duets, waking the echoes of the rocks, and rousing out of the mangroves the stork, the pelican, and the samba, with its plumage red as fire: while the red sunlight died away, and the tropical constellations came out, and while the solemn shadows deepened in that lonely creek, the soft English voices of the two sisters so well attuned together, filled Noah's stern eyes with moisture, and his rough old head with sweet, sad holy thoughts of other times, as he listened, and sat alone, the last occupant of the once crowded and noisy forecastle-bunks.
That lonely creek was fated to present a very different scene about the same hour on the morrow!
The secluded creek in which the ship lay moored had a little history of its own, that was better than the misty recollections of old Marco Polo, who, by-the-way, never visited Madagascar at all. It was in this solitary little basin, or natural dock, that the high-pooped and low-waisted caravella of the first discoverer of Madagascar, Lorenzo Almieda (son of Don Francisco Almieda, viceroy of India for Don Emmanuel of Portugal, in 1506), came to anchor, after a voyage that was long and perilous; and now, as our friends Morley and Heriot gazed on its strange and fantastic cliffs, the former thought of the Serendib of the "Arabian Nights," and the latter, who was better read, recalled the Island of the Moon, and the Cerne of Pliny, with the works of other writers, who averred that Madagascar was an isle divided between two races--one of giants, and another of dwarfs--the Kimos--about three feet high. These were always at war, until the former were victorious, at a place called Itapere, two leagues south-west of Fort Dauphin, where a pyramid of stones attests the alleged slaughter and destruction of the poor dwarfs.