four
o'clock in the afternoon
He smiled abstractedly at her and went back to the controls . And then the plane kept on steadily . Time and space have become purely relative in these days , in startling verification of Mr. Einstein , and the distance between Buenos Aires and Magellan Strait is great or small , a perilous journey or a mere day 's travel , according to the mind and the transportation facilities of the voyager . Before four o'clock in the afternoon the coast was low and sandy to the westward , and it continued sterile and bare for long hours while the plane hung high against the sky with a following wind driving it on vastly more swiftly than its own engines could have contrived . * * * * * It was little before sunset when the character of the shore changed yet again , and the sun was low behind a bank of angry clouds when the stubby forefinger of rock that Magellan optimistically named the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins reached upward from the seemingly placid water . Bell swept lower , then , much lower , looking for a landing place . He found it eight or nine miles farther on , on a wide sandy beach some three miles from a lighthouse .