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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
in the bottom of the boat. I
felt her mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech,
we waited the end. We were not far off the line the wind made with
the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that
some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past
before we reached the surf.
"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew
deceived neither of us.
"By God, we WILL go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.
The oath left my lips in my excitement--the first, I do believe, in
my life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be
accounted an oath.
"I beg your pardon," I said.
"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint
smile. "I do know, now, that we shall go clear."
I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the
promontory, and as we looked we could see grow the intervening
coastline of what was evidently a deep cove. At the same time
there broke upon our ears a continuous and mighty bellowing. It
partook of the magnitude and volume of distant thunder, and it came
to us directly from leeward, rising above the crash of the surf and
travelling directly in the teeth of the storm. As we passed the
point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of white
sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered
with myriads of seals. It was from them that the great bellowing
went up.
"A rookery!" I cried. "Now are we indeed saved. There must be men
and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly there
is a station ashore."
But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, "Still
bad, but not so bad. And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall
drift by that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered
beach, where we may land without wetting our feet."
And the gods were kind. The first and second headlands were
directly in line with the south-west wind; but once around the
second,--and we went perilously near,--we picked up the third
headland, still in line with the wind and with the other two. But
the cove that intervened! It penetrated deep into the land, and
the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the point.
Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell,
and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row. From the point the
shore curved away, more and more to the south and west, until at
last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked
harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples
where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over
the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet
inshore.
Here were no seals whatever. The boats stern touched the hard
shingle. I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud. The next moment
she was beside me. As my fingers released hers, she clutched for
my arm hastily. At the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to
the sand. This was the startling effect of the cessation of
motion. We had been so long upon the moving, rocking sea that the
stable land was a shock to us. We expected the beach to lift up
this way and that, and the rocky walls to swing back and forth like
the sides of a ship; and when we braced ourselves, automatically,
for these various expected movements, their non-occurrence quite
overcame our equilibrium.
"I really must sit down," Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a
dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
I attended to making the boat secure and joined her. Thus we
landed on Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long
custom of the sea.
CHAPTER XXIX "Fool!" I cried aloud in my vexation. I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach, where I had set about making a camp. There was driftwood, though not much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from the Ghosts larder had given me the idea of a fire. "Blithering idiot!" I was The Sea Wolf page 108 The Sea Wolf page 110 |