ABSTRACT
Captain Nicholas and his crew had become very pleasant and full of consideration for me. They passed their period of quarantine on board, but a boat, 245sent by the health authorities, came to take the passengers to the island, which indeed, when I saw it more closely, was rather a peninsula. A narrow creek among the rocks, shaded by trees of a great age, ended at a staircase leading to a kind of cloister whose pointed arches rested upon stone pillars and supported a cedar roof as in the monasteries at Rome. All around the sea was breaking on rocks carpeted by kelp, and the only thing needed to recall the first act of Maturin's Bertram was a choir of monks and a storm.
