Part 9 (2/2)

Yes, it was quite true, one must look round, but there was grub enough for a month and there was plenty of time before them. Then La Touche began to argue about star-fish. He had never heard of people eating star-fish. If they were to be condemned to eat stuff like that it would be better to quit. One might have fancied from his tone that it was Cleo's fault that such a suggestion should be made.

Cleo listened patiently and Bompard sat evidently approving. It was almost as though the two were in league against her, just as children get in league against an adult who insists on unpleasant duties or uncongenial food.

But a will was at work stronger than theirs and presently, tapping out their pipes, they rose up. La Touche, at her direction, placed the new found Maconochie tins, the cotton waste, the bradawl and wire with the rest of the stores, far back in the cave, and then, following her, they lumbered along down the beach in the direction of the cliff break like two schoolboys after a governess.

The cliff break was a narrow gully piercing the basalt and bending upon itself; here they parted, the men striking up the gulley and the girl continuing her way along the beach.

”And be sure to look out for some wood,” she cried after them, ”any sort of wood.”

”Ay, ay,” said Bompard, ”we'll be on the look out right enough.”

Then they vanished and she pursued her way alone, picking up things as she went, turning over sh.e.l.ls and thinking of her companions.

The wind had fanned up again to a strong breeze but the sound of the surf had fallen with the receding tide and the stretch of wet sand below high tide mark was strewn with huge kelp ribbons, ma.s.ses of seaweed, sh.e.l.ls, all empty, cuttle fish bones and the star-fish despised of La Touche.

Then she came upon something that gave her a grue, it seemed at first like a white rock, it was a skull. The skull of some enormous creature half-bedded in the sand just above the tide mark, possibly cast up in some storm. She thought it might be the skull of a whale and as she stood looking at it, suddenly, the desolation around came in upon her with the fact that she was absolutely alone.

Suppose the men lost their way--suppose that they never came back? The thought clutched her heart like a hand. To be here, alone, absolutely alone, forever!

For a moment panic seized her and the wild impulse came upon her to turn and run back to the cave. Then she mastered herself, fighting down the surging in her throat, and continuing her way steadily and with renewed strength. She had not cast the thought away, she had mastered it and as she went she contemplated it as a victor contemplates the dead body of an a.s.sailant.

Then she saw the penguins, she had not noticed them before, they were drawn up in long lines at the base of the cliff and the sight of them destroyed the desolation just as the skull had crystallized it around her.

A great pow-wow was going on amongst the penguins. Three birds, separate from the others, were standing, two facing one another bowing and discussing something, the third standing by, putting in a word now and then and now and then coming right between the disputants.

She watched them for awhile and then went on. She had no time to waste.

The thought of coming back empty handed after all her talk to the men pursued her. She was looking for food and had found none--nothing but the star-fish.

The gulls evidently found plenty of food. But for a human being there seemed nothing, and as she went on and on the thought of what would happen when those tins in the cave were empty came at her just as the terror of finding herself alone had come, and this thought was not to be combated by an effort of will simply because it was born of Reason.

Her clear and practical mind saw starvation, over-leaped the slender food barrier that held hunger only a month away from them and wandered in a wilderness where nothing was.

She had reached the rock surface now that stretched away level and smooth, broken by cracks and pot holes and strewn here and there with weed. The cliffs had fallen away, giving a view of the broken country and the mountains with their snow-covered tops, immense, wrapped in distance under the dull grey day, remote, yet clearly defined in that air, crystal clear as the air of Iceland.

It was like looking at Silence herself, silence set off and explained by the beach noises, the sound of the surf, the calling of the terns, the mewing of the great white gulls.

She saw Kerguelen as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Standing there alone she saw it for the first time in all its utter nakedness. If no food were to be found on the busy beach, what food could be found in that carved, silent, cruel land where not a single tree shewed in all the miles of desolation?

A stealthy sc.r.a.ping sound behind her made her wheel round.

Up from a rock pond which she had pa.s.sed without examining had risen a crab, its body was not bigger than the two fists of a man put together, yet it moved standing high up like a spider on slender stilts that if stretched out would have measured four feet or more. She watched it with dilated eyes as it scrambled and hurried along, vanis.h.i.+ng at last like a spectre in some cleft of the rock. There was something of a skeleton about it as well as something of a spider, it was like a caricature of food drawn by Famine. It made the whole beach hideous for a moment and it made the food hunter almost afraid to go on. She crushed the fear and went on, reaching a place where the rocks ceased and a broad level of sand stretched to where the rocks began again and further on the river ran down.

Where the sand met the further rocks a huge conical stone stood with a gull roosting on its top, and just as a person fixes on some object as the limit of his walk she determined to go as far as this stone and then turn back.

As she drew close to it the gull flapped its wings and flew away and she saw that the thing was not a stone but the figure-head of a s.h.i.+p, the form of a woman with ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s, broken and scarred by years of weather and stained with the droppings of gulls. The arms were gone, but the great face remained almost in its entirety staring away across the sands and the sea.

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