Our guide had another favorite place on the east side of Isabela. Off Cabo Marshall, Antonio led our divers through clouds of silvery salema and straight into a cloud of hammerhead sharks. Overhead, manta rays winged their way along disdainfully, black clouds against the shimmer of the ocean’s underside.

Seabirds own Isla Genovesa. More than 140,000 red-footed boobies roost there, and the trail around the sandy beach near the anchorage offers an in-your-face show of Nazca and blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, swallowtail gulls, lava herons and finches. The afternoon breeze brought shearwaters racing in looping sweeps by the steep cliffs. Frigate birds, lacking glands to waterproof their feathers, crowded the sky and fed themselves by robbery, tormenting the birds returning from fishing. One yanked the long tail of a tropic bird, catching its regurgitated lunch in mid-air. Screams of ravaged birds echoed off the bluffs.

Four tour boats crowded the anchoring shelf in the abysmally deep Darwin Bay. They left with their tourists late in the day, which is the coolest time to venture to the plateau. There, palo santo (holy wood) trees and thorny bushes cover the eroded terrain like wisps of thinning hair on a bleached skull. Clearly, the birds liked it. Over the windward shore, swarms of storm petrels fluttered like butterflies. In the scant shade of bushes, boobies tended large fluffy chicks. Under the cliff overhangs, fur seals were waking up, and young males tried their strength in mock fights.

Old whaling-ship sailors called the archipelago "Islas Encantadas" (the bewitched or enchanted islands), referring to the variable currents and sudden fogs. Yet the nickname fits these GPS days, too. The volcanic islands are riding southeast on a tectonic plate at nearly two inches a year. The geologically young Isla Santiago and nearby Isla Bartolomé have the texture and color of a cooling inferno. Santiago’s red slag heaps glow against blankets of black, ropy lava like wrecks from the big bang. On Bartolomé, we walked on the shoulders of a dead volcano above gaping spatter cones of jagged cinder. The landmark Pinnacle Rock leans over the anchorage like a finger warning of the earth’s frailty, yet on life goes. Later that night, we shut off the underwater lights to keep misguided turtle hatchlings from bumping into the swim platform.

Every voyage through the Galápagos Islands makes me long for another. Is it because in other places animals and land vanish, rapidly displaced by development for human needs? I wonder how long the Galápagos will survive? Considering the instability of Ecuadorian politics, let’s hope Kurt Vonnegut was a joker and not a prophet when he wrote "Galápagos" in the 1980s.

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