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half-suspended in jaded expectation of the sun. This was the critical hour
to catch Rodondo in his perfect mood. The twilight was just enough to
reveal every striking point, without tearing away the dim investiture of
wonder.

From a broken, stairlike base, washed as the steps of a water palace by the
waves, the tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven summit. These
uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most peculiar feature. For
at their lines of junction they project flatly into encircling shelves,
from top to bottom, rising one above another in graduated series. And as
the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive with swallows, so were all
these rocky ledges with unnumbered seafowl. Eaves upon eaves, and nests
upon nests. Here and there were long birdlime streaks of a ghostly white
staining the tower from sea to air, readily accounting for its saillike
look afar. All would have been bewitchingly quiescent were it not for the
demoniac din created by the birds. Not only were the eaves rustling with
them, but they flew densely overhead, spreading themselves into a winged
and continually shifting canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic birds
for hundreds of leagues around. To the north, to the east, to the west,
stretches nothing but eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war hawk coming
from the coasts of North America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first land