The land was now fully in sight--a stern and rock-bound coast, against which the breakers dashed with maddening violence, and for half a mile from the shore, the water was one conflicting waste of snowy surf and billow. No signs of inhabitants, on either hand, as far as the eye could view, were discernible. The long range of stern, solitary mountains arose from the waves, and towered away till lost in the clouds. Their sides, save where some splintered cliff lifted its gray peaks in the day, were clothed with thick forests, among which the tufted palm and wild cinnamon stood up conspicuously, like sentinels looking afar over the wide waste of blue. Here and there a torrent could be traced, leaping from crag to cliff, seeming, as it blazed in the fierce sun-light, to run liquid fire; and gorgeous masses of wild creepers and tangled undergrowth hung down over the embattled heights, swaying and flaunting in the gale, like the banners and streamers of an encamped army.
Not the slightest chance for harbor or anchorage could be discovered along the whole iron-bound coast, yet the gallant little Sea-sprite held steadily on her course, steering broad for the base of the mountains.
"Why, in the name of madness, is the fellow driving in among the breakers?" muttered our captain;--"Thinks he to escape by running into danger? By Mars, and if I mistake not, he shall have peril to his heart's content, ere nightfall!"
But fate willed that we should be disappointed; for just as every thing had been arranged to treat the bucaneer with a fist full of grape and canister, one of those sudden tempests, so common to the West Indies in the autumn months, was upon us. A vast, black, conglomerated volume of vapor swung against the mountain summits, and curled heavily down over the cliffs. Brilliant scintillations were darting from its shadowy borders, and the zigzag lightnings were playing about it, and licking its ragged folds like the tongues of an evil spirit! Suddenly it burst asunder, and a burning gleam--a wide conflagration, as if the very earth had exploded--flashed over the hills, accompanied with a peal of thunder that made the broad ocean tremble, and our deck quiver under us, like a harpooned grampus in his death gasp! The electric fluid upheaved and hurled to fragments an immense peak near the summit of the mountains, and huge masses of rock, with thunderous din, and amid clouds of dust, smoke and fire, came bounding and racing down from crag to crag, uprooting the tall cedars, and dashing to splinters the firm iron-wood trees, as though they had been but reeds--sweeping a wide path of ruin through the thick forests, and shivering to atoms and dust the loose rocks that obstructed their career, till, with a whirring bound, they plunged from a beetling cliff into the sea, causing the tortured water to send up a cloud of mist and spray. All on board were struck aghast at the blinding brilliancy of the flash and its terrible effects.