It was a gloomy home-coming. I was tired and cross, and the skies were angry too. Clouds were thicker and heavier than I had ever seen them in Garrison; and not even the news of a complete measurement of Mars on the previous night, could remove the heavy weight of fog that had settled on me and Mars Bay. My bright vision of a land where skies were always blue was bidding me farewell, and the parting was grievous. To be sure the tents were much improved since my former visit, and altogether there was now a good foundation on which to build comfort; but I looked at everything through the fog, having, unfortunately, lost my couleur-de-rose spectacles for the time, and I felt that I should not find them until I had seen Mars.

No observations were possible that night, and next day—Sunday, it rained heavily. This was the first wet day we had experienced in Ascension, and the first we had ever spent under canvas. Our tent doors of course faced windward, and a tepid shower-bath roused us early in the morning.

The bedroom-tent was now floored with undressed planks. The ropes were well secured to the ground by iron pegs, driven into the clinker, the usual wooden pegs having no hold here. An ample mosquito net protected the bed; and a military-chest of drawers, an iron wash-stand, a bath, and a couple of wicker chairs completed the furnishing.

In order to make the process of taking root on Ascension intelligible, it is necessary first to explain something of the nature of its soil, and the peculiar manner of its cultivation. In other words, to make our own particular story less incoherent, it will be advisable, in the first place, to tell the little I know of the past history of our new home, and in what condition we found it in 1877.

Like its upturned face, the history of Ascension is featureless and colourless, being only redeemed from utter inanity by its contradictoriness. Doubtless there were stirring times here once on a day when Vulcan's forge was alight, but that was before we short-sighted mortals dared to peep into this now deserted workshop of the grimy god.

On Ascension Day, 1501, Juan de Nova, the great Portuguese navigator, found the fire gone out, and only hills of cinder and plains of ash to bear record of past labours. Ascension, so called by its discoverer from the fact of his having sighted it on Ascension Day, is one of the peaks of a submarine volcanic ridge which separates the northern and southern basins of the Atlantic, and is situated in lat. 8° S., long. 14° W., almost midway between the coasts of Africa and South America. It is one of the most isolated islands in the world, and has no land nearer than St. Helena, which lies 800 miles to the South-East.

Three days brought us within sight of Ascension. What a sight it was! The sun had been up some hours when we anchored in Clarence Bay on the 13th of July, and the “Abomination of Desolation” seemed to be before our eyes as we looked eagerly at the land.

A few scattered buildings lay among reddish-brown cinders near the shore—a sugar-loaf hill of the same colour rose up behind and bounded the view. We looked about in a sort of hopeless way for “Green Mountain,” but it was nowhere to be seen, and we set it down as a fable—a mere myth. “Nothing green,” we said, “exists, or could exist here.” Stones, stones, everywhere stones, that have been tried in the fire and are now heaped about in dire confusion, or beaten into dust which we see dancing in pillars before the wind. Dust, sunshine, and cinders, and low yellow houses frizzling in it all!

Is that Ascension?

Well, not quite; its coast presented a livelier scene, though one that we would gladly have dispensed with. A black perpendicular wall of rock jutted out into the bay, and on either side of it a stretch of white glistening sand swept to north and south. It is on this rock that the “Tartar Stairs” are cut, and here we must land.

A few days after the triple excitement of Mars, the Orontes, and the Mail, two blood-stained travellers arrived at our encampment towards sunset, with torn clothes and limping gait. At first sight of them I felt a thrill of alarm, but was soon relieved by a familiar voice calling out cheerily, “Halloo, Gill, we have not fallen among thieves, only upon the clinker—the horse bolted with us, made too free with the road, and a big bump threw us out on the top of each other.”

Here was a thrilling tale wherewith to stir up our quiet life, and after hearing it in full detail I registered an inward vow, never to drive across the clinker with that horse. Our friends, happily, did not seem hurt, beyond a few bruises and some slight cuts about the arms, but these were enough to stain their torn sleeves and give them an air quite touching and heroic.

Of course there was considerable abuse of our thoroughfare, and we now heard for the first time, that the day the Orontes was in harbour, several of her officers, with two lady passengers, had set out with the intention of paying us a visit. But the bumping had been such as to bump a wheel off one cart; and some accident, I forget what, having happened to the other, the whole party was obliged to return to Garrison without having been able to reach our inaccessible retreat.

New Year's Day, 1878, was a hot day in Ascension, and we tried hard to keep cool by recalling former New Year's Days spent in Scotland, much to the disadvantage of the present one.

What a burden life becomes when its chief end is to war against heat! Life, did I say? It is only existence in such latitudes, and with brain half-awake you speculate dreamily about life, with its hurry and feverish bustle, as a thing far off and beyond you; and if sometimes you try to grasp it, nerves and spirit fail, you miss it, and, worn out with the effort, sink back into a deeper lethargy than before. That is to say, if you do not wear some gre-gre strong enough to defy the evil power of indolence—a Fetish too evil and too powerful in these climes to be easily overcome. But English pluck and Scotch endurance can do it. Stay at home, or hang these gre-gres round your neck.

In Ascension each man wore one; and at six o'clock this New Year's morning my husband and two of the island officers were hard at work, practising for a rifle-match that they were to shoot the same afternoon against three officers of H.M.S. Sea-gull, then in harbour.

David was sadly out of practice; neither did the scoring of his allies, in this preliminary canter, give much promise of success, especially as their opponents had a high reputation as marksmen.