And still the wind increased, its voice now a long monotonous cry, steadily sharpening, yet deepening, stern as the Voice of Wrath.

"It's blowing up," said Raft, "and there's more coming."

Then over the cliff and undershot by the last rays of sunset came the clouds chased and harried by the wind, tearing before and torn by the teeth of the gale.

Raft and the girl stood watching till pebbles and rocks the size of coconuts began to fall on the beach blown over the cliff edge, till the sea, flat and milk-white, seemed to bend under the stress, till it would seem that the very islands would be blown away.

The girl felt light-headed and giddy as though the rush above had rarefied the air under the cliffs. Not a drop of rain fell, the wind held the sky and the whole world. It seemed loosed from some mysterious keeping never to be recaptured until it had blown the sea away and flattened the earth.

And still it increased.

Raft, taking the girl by the arm, drew her back into the cave; she was trembling. It seemed to her that this was no storm, that something had gone wrong with the scheme of things, that this Voice steadily being keyed up was the voice of some string keeping everything together, stretched to its utmost and sure to snap.

Then it snapped.

The whole of Kerguelen seemed to burst like a bomb-shell with a blaze of light shewing islands and sea.

Then again it seemed to burst with a light struggling through a deluge.

The boom of the rain on the sea came between the thunder crashes whilst a giant on the hills seemed to stand steadily working a flashlight, a light so intense that now and again through broken walls of rain the islands could be seen like far white ghosts wreathed in mist.

They sat down on the floor of the cave and the man put his arm about the girl as if to protect her; then something came sniffing at them, it was a little sea elephant that had got astray and scared by the work outside had crept in for shelter and company. The girl rested her hand on it and it lay still.

It seemed to her now that she could hear the gods of the storm as they battled, hear their cries and breathing and trampling, whilst every moment a thousand foot giant in full armour would come crashing to earth, knee, shoulder and helmet hitting the rocks in succession.

"It's a big blow," came Raft's voice, "no call to be scared."

He was holding her to him like a child whilst she held to her the little sea elephant, and so they remained, the three of them until the big blow, failing to tear Kerguelen from its foundations, began to pause like a spent madman.

The flashlight man on the hills began to work his apparatus more slowly and now the thunder seemed doing its vast work away out at sea and all sounds became gradually merged in the enormous, continuous sound of the rain.

The little sea elephant seemed suddenly to take fright at the strange company it found itself in and went tumbling and sniffing out to find its mates, whilst through the night came the occasional "woof" of a bull as if giving praise that the worst was over.

"The old sea cows know it's done," said Raft, "now you'd better get under your blankets,—you aren't afraid to be alone?"

"I'm not afraid a bit now," said she. She patted his hand as a child might and he crawled out and she heard him swearing at the rain as he made for his hole in the cliff.

She remembered the porpoises and fell to thinking of what would have happened had she and Raft started on their expedition yesterday or the day before. That wind, which sent rocks flying on to the beach, would have blown them away.

She said this next morning as they stood watching the sea. The sea was worth watching. The due-south wind had stirred the heart of the ocean from west of Enderby land, and, like a trumpeter, was leading a vast flood that split on Heard Island only to re-form and burst on the southern shores of Kerguelen.

They could hear the vague far-off roar of it all those leagues away beyond the mountains, mixed with the cry of the wind still blowing a full gale, and beyond the shelter of the land they could see the islands getting it, bombarded by the waves and up to their shoulders in sea-smoke and foam.

Then as they stood, suddenly and like a thing shot dead, the wind ceased, and in the silence the roar of the beaches far and near arose like a fume of sound. Then, as suddenly, the wind came shouting out of the west, piling up a cross sea that leapt like the water in a boiling pot.

"I'm thinking when this blow is over we may have a spell of fine weather," said Raft, "and it will be just as well for us to be making our plans and getting things ready so's we won't be behind hand when the fine spell comes."

"I think so too," said she, "we will have to take food with us—how much?"

"Enough for a month," said he, "who knows, we may have to come back, and there's not much to be had elsewhere." Then he fell into thought for a moment, "maybe stuff for a fortnight will be enough for there's birds and rabbits to be got, and gulls' eggs. Them old penguins let you screw their necks as if it come natural to them, we don't want to take too big a load."

Then they found themselves at a loss, it was quite easy to arrange to take a fortnight's food, but how much did that mean?

They determined to use two blankets for sacks and then made a rough calculation, based on imagination, and collected together tins of meat and vegetables and the remaining biscuits, the result was a burden that two people might have carried but not very far.

"We've overshot it," said Raft.

"We'll never be able to carry all that," said the girl, "or if we did we would have to go so slowly that the journey would be much longer—it cuts both ways."

They reduced the load by nearly a half.

"There's one thing," said he, "there's no call to take water with us, there's holes full of water everywhere, seems to me in this place."

Then he turned to look at the weather.

The wind was less and the clouds were thinning and the air had the feel of a break coming. Then, just before sunset the clouds parted in the west and the sun went down in a sky red as blood.

"We'll start tomorrow," said Raft.



PART V

CHAPTER XXVII

THE CORRIDOR

The next morning broke grey and fair.

When the girl came out she found that Raft had collected the things to be taken in one bundle tied up in a blanket. He had also set out breakfast. The remainder of the stores he had stacked at the back of the cave where he slept.

These stores, with what was still in the cache, would be useful if they had to come back to the beach.

"But what am I to carry?" asked she.

"Oh, there's no call for you to trouble," answered he, "you've got your oilskins. I reckon that'll be enough for you to bother with. Them things in the bundle is no weight for a man."

She tried to argue the question. It seemed to her impossible that any single person could carry that load for long, but she might just as well have argued with the gentle wind blowing now shorewards from the islands. He lifted the bundle with one great hand to demonstrate its lightness; he was also going to take the harpoon as a sort of walking stick.

It seemed to her that she had never realized his strength before, nor his placid determination that seemed more like an elemental force than the will of a man.

She gave in and sat down to the meal, biscuits and the remains of a stew, and as she ate she watched the great sea bulls and the cows and the young ones that now were able to land, boosting through the foam like their elders, and as she watched she wondered whether she would ever see these things again, there, against the setting of the sea and the great islands.

She had put on her boots for the journey and a pair of men's soft woollen socks from the store in the cache. They were small men's socks and the wool was so fine and soft that the size did not trouble her. In her pocket she still carried the few odds and ends including the tobacco box in which she had placed her rings. She wore the sou'wester, and the oilskin lay beside her folded and ready to be carried on her arm.

Then, when the meal was finished, Raft washed the plates and stored them in the cave. He stood looking at the stored things for a moment as if to make sure they would be all right, then he kicked an old tin away into a cleft of the rocks as though to tidy the place, then he took up the harpoon and slung the bundle on his shoulder.

The girl rose and looked around her. This place where she had suffered and nearly died was still warm with memories, and the sea creatures were like friends, she had grown to love them just as people love trees or familiar inanimate things.

To associate the idea of home with that desolate beach, those moving monsters, those caves, would seem absurd. Well, it was like leaving home, and as she stood looking around her a tightness came in her throat and her eyes grew misty. But Raft was moving now and she followed him, glancing back now and then until they crossed the river where she looked back for the last time. The river was almost deserted now by the young sea elephants, except at its mouth. A few little girl seals lay about, delicate or unadventurous creatures whose lives would doubtless be short in a world that is only for the strong. These little girl seals had attracted her attention before, they had almost the ways of fine ladies. It was as though some germ of civilization in the herd had become concentrated in them and she had wondered whether they would ever pull through the rough and tumble of life, recognising vaguely that nature is opposed to civilization at heart. They seemed allied to herself and their future seemed as doubtful as her own here where nothing helped, where everything opposed.

She caressed them with her eyes for the last time; then as she turned and followed Raft she forgot them. Her brave mind, that nothing could daunt but loneliness, faced the great adventure ahead not only undaunted but uplifted. The way was terrific, the chances were small, so small, so remote, that they could scarcely be called chances, and the penalty of failure was return and a winter here when the beach would be deserted by all but the gulls. The very desperation of the business made it great, and from the greatness came the uplift.

They passed the figure-head with its sphinx-like face staring over the sea, and the great skull half sanded over by the recent blow. Then they drew near the caves and the boat.

The boat had been blown over on its other side by the wind and lay with one gunnel deep buried in the sand and its keel presented to the cliffs; she glanced only once at the caves, deserted now by the birds who had no doubt picked the last fragments of the dead man.

Then they climbed the Lizard rocks and at the highest point sat down to rest for a moment.

Raft, with the bundle beside him and the harpoon held between his knees, swung his head from the great beach on his right to the broken country on his left.

He said nothing, not wishing perhaps to dishearten his companion. It was she who spoke.

"That's the plain I told you of," said she, "we mustn't cross it, you can see from here some of the dangerous patches, those yellow ones, but there are others just as bad that you can't tell till you are trapped in them. I would have gone down, only a bird flying overhead dropped a fish on the ground right in front of me and the fish disappeared."

"We'd better get along the sea-shore rocks, seems to me," said Raft, "the tide's going out, all them rocks between tide marks is pretty flat."

"Suppose the tide comes in," said she, "and we can't get up the cliffs?"

"Oh, we'll have lots of time to make a good way before it comes back," replied he, "and we've got to trust a bit to chance, we've got to strike bold. I reckon we'd better trust to instinc'." He laughed in his beard. "The same sort of instinc' that made that bird drop the fish to give you soundin's of that mud hole."

"Providence," said she, "yes—you are right."

"I believe in strikin' bold," said he, almost as though he were talking to himself. "It's like fighting with a chap, the fellow that does the hittin' without bothering about bein' hit. He's the chap. Well, if you're restored, we'll be gettin' along."

He heaved up and led the way, striking right down to the sea and pausing now and then to help her. Once he lifted her as though she were a feather from one rock to the other. Then, all of a sudden they came to a ten foot drop. There was no getting round that drop, it was a basalt step that circled the whole Lizard Point on its seaward side. It did not disconcert Raft. He threw the harpoon down, then he lowered himself, clutching the edge and let himself fall. Following his directions she threw him the bundle. It would have felled an ordinary landsman, but he caught it, placed it beside him and then ordered her to jump, just as she stood, without lowering herself.

"Jump with your arms up," said he, laughing, "no call to lower yourself. I'll catch you."

It was like an order to commit suicide. It seemed to her impossible, she thought that he only spoke in fun, then she knew that he was in earnest, that he was ordering her. But it was impossible—absolutely. Then she jumped with arms raised, jumped into two great hands that clipped her round the waist and brought her, feet to ground, with scarcely a jar.

"I didn't think you'd have done it," said he. "You ain't wanting in pluck."

"I knew it would be all right if you told me," said she, "but I didn't want to do it until the very last moment."

After that she would have jumped over a cliff if he had told her. It seemed to her that he was invincible—infallible.

A climb of a couple of minutes brought them down to the tide mark rocks, the tide was a quarter out and the sea comparatively calm and the rocks flat-topped like those of the seal beach and free from seaweed except where, here and there, were piled masses of giant kelp torn up from its deep sea attachments and cast here by the waves. It lay in ridges that had to be climbed over sometimes and seemed entirely confined to the Lizard Point and the rocks beyond, for when they reached where the cliffs began it ceased to occur.

Where the cliffs began they first experienced the true meaning of a journey along that coast.

She had seen these cliffs from the boat, but that view, though forbidding enough, had told her little of the reality.

They rose from two to four hundred feet in height, these cliffs, and looking up was like looking up a wall of polished ebony.

Here and there they were streaked with long lines of white where the guillemots in their thousands sat on ledges, and here and there they were faced by seaward rocks standing out in the water and carved by the waves into all sorts of fantastic shapes, but waves and rocks and sea and sky, all these were nothing, here the cliffs were everything, dominating the mind and soul, sinister, and tinging every sound from the wave echoes to the gull voices with tragedy.

And high tide mark was the cliff base in fine weather, in foul, the waves would lash and dash and beat fifty feet up, there was not a guillemot ledge lower than eighty feet, puffins, razorbills and kittiwakes, who always build above the guillemots did not seem to come here at all, keeping to the seaward rocks and the coast line where the cliffs drew further away from the sea.

With the sea so close on the right and the cliffs on the left the girl felt like a mouse in a trap designed for an elephant. Alone she would never have dared this road, even with Raft leading her she felt timid and oppressed. The place did not seem to affect Raft. Plodding ahead as indifferently as though he were on some civilized country road, he talked to her now and then over his shoulder, calling attention to queer shaped crabs or dead kelp fish, and ever as they went their road grew broader as the tide drew out.

It was now about an hour and a half after high water, that is to say, quarter ebb; in a little more than ten hours it would be high water again, before that they must find a way from the beach or be drowned. Raft knew this and the girl knew it too. It seemed almost impossible that, with so much time before them, they could not find a break in the cliffs towards safe ground, yet the cliffs seemed to stretch endlessly before them and their pace was slow, not more than three miles an hour. They rested sometimes for a moment watching the out-going sea and the gulls; unused to exercise the girl was tired, and the man knew it. Alone he could have travelled swiftly and without resting, but he said nothing, and though he knew the necessity of speed, it was he who made the halts for the sake of his companion. Three hours after noon he took some food out of the bundle and made her eat. They had already drunk from a little torrent rushing out of a crack in the cliff wall, but even so the food seemed dry and she could scarcely swallow it. Anxiety had her in its grip, the cliffs stretching on and on interminably seemed like misfortune itself made visible.

Said Raft: "The tide's near the turn and them cliffs don't shew no sign of a cut in them, but then there's only two miles or so to be seen from here. Round that bend there's no knowing, they may break away beyond there. What I'm thinkin' is this. We've time to get back along the road we've come by before it's high water again."

"Go back?"

"We've time to do it; if we keep on our course it will take us maybe near an hour to get to that shoulder and from there we won't have much time to get back before high water again. We've cut it too fine and if the tide comes back and catches us before we get to a break we're done."

She looked forward then she looked back. They were in a veritable corridor. The sea formed the right hand wall of this corridor, the cliffs varying from two hundred to three hundred feet high formed the left hand wall, cliffs black as ebony, polished by sea washing, unclimbable and tremendous as a dream of Dante.

She saw their full position. There was time to get back from where they stood, but if they went on to the cape of cliff before them there would be no time to get back, they would have to go on, and the unseen cliffs beyond that cape might stretch for twenty miles unclimbable as here.

Yet the idea of going back was horrible, heartbreaking.

She saw that Raft was between two moods. Then she said to him.

"If you were alone would you go back or go on?"

"Me?" said Raft. He paused for a moment as if in thought—"Oh, I reckon I'd go on."

"Then we will go on."

"I was thinkin' of you," said he.

"I know—but I could not bear to go back. If we fail now like that we will fail altogether. Imagine going all that way back. No, I couldn't. We must risk it."

"I'm thinking that way," said he.

He picked up the bundle and harpoon and they started, and no sooner had she taken the first step than Fear laid his hand on her heart and a wild craving to return seized her so that she could have cried out.

She had once said that she feared an ugly face more than a blow, and the fear that seized her now was less the fear of death than the fear of the cliffs and their conspiracy with the murmuring sea that would soon be an inclosing wall.

She fought it down.

The cliff shoulder was further away than they thought; it took them an hour to reach it and, when they turned it, there, before them lay cliffs higher, more monstrous and running in a curve to another shoulder seven miles away, if a yard. But towards the middle of the curve the cliff face seemed ridged and broken near the base. Raft shading his eyes, pointed out this broken surface.

"It looks as if there was foothold there beyond tide mark," said he, "we've got to go on anyhow—Lord, but you're tired!"

He made her sit down. The sight of that gargantuan sweep of cliff coming on top of the weariness of the journey had crushed her. To go forward seemed impossible, to fight against that immensity impossible. She could have wept but she had neither tears nor energy. The gods seemed to have built those bastions to shut out all hope and the voice of the returning sea seemed like a tide turning over her broken thoughts like pebbles.

Raft standing over her like a tower said not a word.

Mixed with the voice of the sea came the voices of the gulls and all sorts of sea echoes from the cliffs.

Then as she sat she made a supreme effort of mind. She must rise and go on. She struggled to rise, but her limbs had left her, deserted her, stricken as if by paralysis.

Raft took off his cap and put it in his pocket, then he went to the cliff side and rested the harpoon against it, standing up. She watched him, vaguely wondering what he was about, then he returned to her and bent down and she found herself lifted suddenly and seated on his left shoulder.

"Hold on to my hair," cried he. Then he bent and picked up the bundle, went to the cliff side and picked up the harpoon and started. The giant strength that had caught her when she jumped from the Lizard Point ledge was carrying her now like a feather, the crook of his left arm round her legs to steady her, the harpoon clutched in his left hand, the bundle swung over his right shoulder.

And she held on to his hair as a child might, without a word, and as she held the strength of him seemed to permeate her through her fingers casting fear and misery out.

She felt as a tiny tired child feels when caught up and carried by its mother, and carrying her so he strode on, cursing himself for not having carried her before.

It was a three-mile journey to that roughness on the cliff and as he drew near he saw that they were saved, at least for the time.

The rock broke here in ledges like steps and twenty feet up and well beyond tide mark ran a little plateau some ten or twelve feet broad.

She saw it as well as he and filled with new strength she cried out to be set down.

"Stay easy," said Raft. "It's easier to carry the bundle with you on my shoulder, you ain't no weight."

Then when he reached the steps:

"Done it b'God," said he.

He dropped the bundle and harpoon, and, lifting her, set her feet on the basalt steps.

"Can you climb it?" asked he.

Without a word she climbed and sitting on the little plateau looked down on him.

Then he followed with the things and took his seat beside her. They sat for a while without a word, the bare rocks and the grey sea before them.

A great rock out at sea, pierced and arched like the frame work of a door, shewed through its opening the sea beyond. Gulls flew round it and their eternal complaint came on the wind blowing, still lightly, from the north.

Raft seemed absorbed in thought.

Then he said: "It won't be high water until gettin' on for dark. We'd better stick here the night anyhow and get the low tide to-morrow. But there's time for me now to get to that next shoulder and see what's beyond, it's a matter of four miles there maybe and four miles back."

"I'll go with you," said she, "I'm stronger now."

"No, you stick here," said he. "There's no call for two to go. You'll want your strength for the morning."

"Only for you I wouldn't be here," said she.

"Well, maybe you wouldn't," said Raft. "It's as well I was along with you, but you ain't no weight—no more than a kitten. I never thought you were as bad as that or I'd have lifted you miles back."

"Aren't you tired?" she asked.

"Me—oh, no, not more than a bit stiff in the arm." He stretched his left arm out. Then he looked at the bundle.

"You don't want nothing to eat just yet?" asked he.

"Not till you come back," she answered. "I'll watch you from here."

He scrambled down, picked up the harpoon which he had left on the rocks and then looked up and nodded to her.

"I'll keep in sight," said he. Then he started.

She watched his great figure as it went, harpoon in hand, growing smaller and smaller, till, now, she could have covered it with her thumb nail. As the distance increased it seemed to go slower and the great black cliffs to grow higher.

At a dizzy height above her cormorants had their nests, they seemed angry about something as they clanged and flew, shooting out into the sky and wheeling back again in an aimless manner. Before her the grey sea crawled, coming, now, steadily shoreward.

The tide seemed coming in faster than usual. She knew that this could not be so and that Raft was too wise to allow himself to be cut off, all the same a smouldering anxiety fed on her heart as she watched the tiny figure now approaching the out-jutting shoulder of cliff. Then it disappeared.

He had promised to keep in sight.

Evidently that was impossible if he wanted to get a view of what lay beyond.

A minute passed, two, three—then the figure reappeared and her heart that had lain still sprang to life again.

As he drew closer she saw him stoop and pick up something, then he came right up to the cliff face, paused a minute and continued his way towards her, walking more slowly now and carrying the thing in his hands.

It was a big shell shaped like an abalone. He had filled it with water from a little torrent running from the cliff and when he reached her he held it up to show.

"We're all right," cried he, "there's only four or five miles of cliff beyond the point, then it breaks away down to the beach. We'll be able to get clear of this to-morrow."

She came down the basalt steps and took the shell from him. He had washed it in the torrent so that the water had no taint of salt. Then, carrying it carefully she got it to the plateau where he followed her.



CHAPTER XXVIII

NIGHT

Towards dark the incoming tide began to hit the cliff base. Raft had taken the things from the bundle and had made her wrap herself in the blanket. "You ain't used to the weather like me," said he, "and this is nothing to bother about. Lucky it's not blowing. Lucky we made this shelf. Hark at that!"

The first full blow of a wave hit the basalt below them with a heart-sickening thud; then miles of stricken cliff began to boom. The terrific corridor was no more, and between them and the Lizard point so many miles away to the east and the point of safety miles away to the west, there was nothing but cliff washed by sea.

"A rotten coast," said Raft as they listened. "Only for this shelf we'd be down there."

"We'd have been flung against the cliff and beaten to pieces," said she.

"That's so," said Raft.

"When we get free from this," she said, "let us keep inland. I don't mind climbing over rocks, anything is better than the coast, under these cliffs."

"We've got to keep pretty close to the cliffs, all the same, to strike that bay," he replied, "hope it's there."

"It is there," said she. "I feel—I know it is there and that we will find a ship. We are being looked after."

"Which way?"

"We are being led. You remember when you saved me from dying in that cave, well, you were making for the bay then. If you had not found me you would have kept on and you would have crossed that plain where the bog places are, it looked the easiest way."

"That's so," said Raft.

"Bompard was swallowed up there. You would have been swallowed up too; you were led to find me for both our sakes. Then, to-day, I could have gone no further only for you, and you remember how we thought of going back? This ledge was here waiting for us. It tells us we have to go on and be brave and everything will come right."

"Well, maybe, you aren't far wrong," replied the other, "we've scraped through so far and maybe we'll scrape through to the end. My main wish is to have a plank under foot again, there ain't no give and take in land, I'm never surefooted on land, there's no lift in it. I reckon I'm like one of them sea chickens not used to solid stuff underfoot. D'you know what one of them gulls does first thing he lands on board a ship by chance?"

"No."

"He gets sick as a dog."

The cliff had an echo which, when it was not answering some loud boost of the sea managed to return words, and between the smack of two waves the girl heard it remark something about a dog. But the echo of the cliff soon had its mouth too full to hold words. The sea now nearly at full flood was bringing big waves along with it. In the gloom they could see the racing grey ghosts, and here, on account of the curve, there was little rhythm in the sound of it that came like the continuous thunder of big drums. At their feet, like the licking vicious tongue of the roaring monster, came the continuous gash-gash of waves washing up and falling back.

The girl sat with the blanket around her leaning close up against the man. She felt as a person feels standing before the cage of a tiger uncertain as to the strength of the bars, sometimes a puff of wind brought a touch of spray on her face, whilst the continuous muffled thunder of the coast leagues seemed like the bastions of the whole world at war with the sea.

"There's no call to be afraid," said Raft. He seemed, by some special faculty, to be able to divine her feelings.

"I'm not exactly afraid," she replied. "It's just that everything seems so big—and those cliffs, now, even when they are hidden, they make one know they are there, they seem wicked and alive, yet not able to move."

"You've hit it," said he, "they're for all the world as if they were looking at a chap. It's a rotten coast, but it's near high water now and the tide will soon be drawing out."

This cheered her.

Then the whale birds began to cry and flit about. The whale birds are blind by daylight and their voices scarcely ever heard, they are the owls of the sea.

The girl talked about them for something to say, then she fell to wondering why on a beach like this there were no sea elephants. Raft explained "sea cows" would never come to a washed beach like this, there were no dry rocks for them to "hang about" on.

He had lit his pipe with the tinder box and the smell of the tobacco came good and comforting, the slap and dash of the waves sounded less vicious, too, as though the sea had done its worst to get at them and was foiled.

Then she said, apropos of nothing but the last of her wandering thoughts: "Have you ever seen a man killed?"

He laughed as though over some pleasant reminiscence. "Dozens." Then he began to recall chaps he had seen killed, falling from aloft and otherwise. He had seen one hit the sea such a smack it split him open, and he had seen a chap under water being pulled to pieces by sharks just as terriers pull an old shoe.

Then he wandered off to a bar scene where a dago—it was at Nagasaki—had been drinking rice rum and knifed a man, a regular prosy old sailor's yarn, with "I says to him," and "he says to me" at every turn.

Then he found that she was leaning more heavily against him and was asleep. He put his pipe beside him and slipped an arm round her. Then, as though sleep were infectious, down he sank still holding her and there they lay. He snoring gently and she with her head pillowed on his chest.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE SUMMIT

"I will break thee." Across Kerguelen those words are written to be read by the soul of man. The rock, the rain, the wind and the sea, these, as instruments, would surely be sufficient for the carrying out of the threat; but the soul of man is strong, hence the spirit of Kerguelen has called to its assistance Fog.

Since landing on the great beach the girl had seen the islands fog-wreathed several times but the beach itself had only once been attacked.

When she awoke on the rock plateau the first word of Raft to her was "fog."

They had slept as the dead sleep for nine hours and Raft had awoken with the girl's head still on his chest and feeling as though he were packed in damp cotton wool. It was after sun up and the fog was so dense that the edge of the plateau was only just visible. Through the fog came the breaking of the waves; the tide was coming in again.

Raft had lit his pipe and the girl, stiff from lying, rose up and stamped about to warm herself. Neither of them spoke a word in the way of grumbling.

The plateau was about twenty yards in length and by drawing off five yards or so one could have a dressing-room screened with a fog veil, so the fog was not an unmixed evil.

Then they breakfasted, listening to the slashing of the water just below and counting the time till the out-going sea would let them loose.

"It's a good job I went to the point last night," said Raft, "else we wouldn't be able to start in this smother, not knowing what was beyond there."

"Will we be able to start in this?" she asked.

"Lord, yes," replied he, "the cliffs will give us a lead, it'll be slow going but we'll do it all right, it's not more than six miles or so to the break from the point there."

"When can we start?"

Raft listened to the water below, it was breaking now against the near rocks but not yet against the cliff base.

"In another three hours or maybe a bit more," said he.

An hour later, as though the Fog spirit had been listening and watching, and as though it despaired of its attack on the heart of the prisoners, the smother began to thin; by the time the tide reluctantly began to free them it had broken up and patches of the blessed blue sky shewed overhead.

By the time they reached the point and had a view of the great cliff break-down that would give them release it was fine weather, with a gently heaving sea breaking in beneath a sky of summer.

It was as though their troubles were ended. At noon they reached the great break-down and a new form of country.

Stretching inland almost to the foothills lay a broad valley, boulder strewn, and looking like the bed of some vanished river. Before them to the west the ground rose from the valley, gently, unbroken, desolate, like nothing so much as the desolate country that borders the Riff coast of Morocco. But it was ease itself compared to the tumble of rocks around and beyond the Lizard Point.

Down the middle of the valley came a little wimpling rivulet like the remains of the river that had once been. They drank from it and rested and had some food, then they started with light hearts, taking the easy ascent to the high ground, treading a moss dark and springy like the moss that covers the old lava beds of Iceland.

"Look!" said the girl.

They had reached the highest point and before them, away to the west, stretched the same rolling dark-smooth country, making low cliffs at the sea edge and then, as if weary of little things, springing gigantic and bold towards the sky.

"It's over there the bay would be," said Raft. "Ponting said it was a black brute of a bay between two cliffs rising higher than a ship's top masts. Well, there's our chance before us—if you call it a chance. It's a long way, taking it how you will."

Chance! Despite her optimism and belief in being led, as she stood now with the wind blowing in her face it seemed to her that she stood before absolute hopelessness.

Nothing, not even the sea corridor, had balked her like that terrible distance, calm, sunlit, yet gloomy like a recumbent giant.

The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden; travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a ship—a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found.

And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Here there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The ship would have to be there, waiting for them.

Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad to dream of such a thing.

Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as he stood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, looking about him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great hump on the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.

No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she, the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, never from the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; before everything, like a rock, he continued.

Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their "chance," that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast, forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair as she stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when, catching sight of something along the high ground to the right he pointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple of hundred yards away.

As they drew close to it it enlarged and other things shewed. It was the top of a skull belonging to a skeleton tucked away in a little hollow as though it were sheltering from the wind.

Rags of clothing still hung to it and the boots were there still that had once belonged to it.

"Wonder what did that poor chap in?" said Raft as he stood looking at it. "Wrecked, most likely and lost himself—well, it's a sign folk have been here, anyhow."

He gauged the measure of the desolation around by his words. Here a skeleton did not make the desolation more desolate; on the contrary, it proved that folk had been here.

So the girl felt.

"He'd have been blown away by this only for that hollow he's in," said Raft, "well, he's out of his troubles whoever he was and whatever ship he hailed from."

"We can't bury him," said she.

"He's buried," said Raft.

He had summed up Kerguelen in two words and there was almost a trace of bitterness in his voice. Beyond the remark that it was a brute of a coast he had never grumbled against the place or abused it or the Almighty for making it, as many a man has done; and now at the summit of things two words sufficed him.

Then, leaving the skeleton to the wind and the sky and the countless ages, they turned and went on their way west.



CHAPTER XXX

THE BAY

It took them till dusk to reach the foot of the western rise of ground; here they slept under a rock, continuing their way next morning, climbing till they reached the summit of the rise and keeping their course along the edge of a cliff that fell a sheer three hundred feet to the shore below.

Sometimes Raft peeped over the cliff edge and once the girl drew close and looked, too, dizzy with the height, made more dreadful by the gulls flying far below.

At noon, far ahead of them, they saw something that made them pause; a little mound. As they drew closer they knew. It was another cache, a cache made of heaped earth and loose stones with about a foot of sign post protruding from it. The post had been broken off in some storm and blown away.

"There'll be stuff under there," said Raft, "and if we have to go back it'll come in handy. It's a pointer to the bay anyhow; there must be some landin' place near here, we've only got to keep on."

They sat down and rested and had some food, eating as much as they wanted now that they had a store to depend on. They had drunk twice that morning from pot holes still half-filled with the rain of a few days ago and they had no need of water—it is the one thing a man never needs in Kerguelen. They were in good spirits; the haunting fear that their provisions might not be enough to last them for the return journey was gone; also, if the bay were near, they could remain now some time, even take up their quarters here to wait on the chance of a ship.

The idea came to them to make a burrow into the cache, now, working with the harpoon and their hands, and for the purpose of verifying the contents; but they put it away, the desire to get on drove them like a whip and they went on, halting towards dusk and sleeping in a hollow that gave them shelter from the wind that was blowing from the south.

Towards dawn the wind changed to the west and at the first rays of light Raft awoke, sat up and sniffed. Then he laid his hand on the girl's shoulder.

"Smell that!" cried he.

She sat up, her eyes half-blind with sleep.

"Smell the wind!" said Raft.

She turned her face to the west. On the wind was coming the ghost of a smell, faint and horrible and soul-searching.

"That's a ship," said Raft.

"A ship!"

"Boiling down blubber. I struck that smell once, seven years ago; it's blubber. I reckon we're all right." He heaved himself on to his feet and the girl half-rose, kneeling, and looked at him.

"Are you sure?"

"Sure as sure; smell it."

Then, as she sniffed again, she knew. That was not a nature smell; horrible though it was it was not the tragic smell of corruption. It had something, almost one might say, low down about it, little, mean, business-like—it was her first sniff of returning Civilization, the first impression on an olfactory sense cleared and cleaned by the winds of Kerguelen.

She looked at Raft. He was standing, shading his eyes as though staring at the smell. The dawn was at his back, and across the dawn a flight of wild duck was making in from the sea.

Imagine a person walking in a garret from absolute penury to find himself a millionaire. Such a person, were he normal, would feel what the girl felt as the message of that noxious odour struck home to her mind.

Her teeth chattered a little as she rose to her feet. She could not speak and she had to hold her lower jaw with her hand to still it. Then the muscles of her throat did all sorts of queer things on their own account and a violent feeling of sickness seized her that would have ended in an attack of vomiting had it not passed as quickly as it came. Raft, who had ceased staring to the west, saw how she was taken and put his hand on her shoulder.

"You'll be all right in a bit," said he, "it comes hard at first. I've seen chaps go clean off their heads sniffin' land after three months of hell and weather. We'll start in a bit, there's no call to hurry, and I'll just take a walk to get the stiffness out of my legs."

Off he went, away and away, disappearing beyond a dip in the ground.

She knew that he would be away at least half an hour. Thoughtful as a mother for her comfort, yet almost as outspoken, sometimes, as a nurse, he was wonderful.

The dawn broke broader and stronger, peaceful and grey, promising a continuance of the fine weather that had now lasted for three days, three days without wind or rain or threat from the mountains that sat this morning far away and clear cut against the sky.

Then as they went on their way the sun broke over the edge of the high lands and gulls rising above the cliff edge flitted like birds born of snow and fire.

They stopped for ten minutes to breakfast, then they went on, and now suddenly came something new. On the wind they could hear the sound of gulls quarrelling, a sound quite distinct from the ordinary mewing and wheezing of the gulls at peace.

"We're near there," said Raft. "Hark at the gulls, they're fighting over the scraps. Them chaps, whoever they are, have been killing seals and boiling the blubber. The bay's there."

He pointed to a higher rise in the ground just before them and to the fact that the land from there sloped down inland at a terrific rate.

He was right.

Ten minutes walking brought them to the end of their journey and to the edge of a cliff two hundred feet high. It was as though a giant had taken a gouge and cut a bay right through the sea cliffs. Far across the water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as the one on whose edge they stood.

The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like witches' cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke. Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.

But the clove in this devil's mixture was the ship moored in the cliff shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay, barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk. One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old picture of the ships of Drake.

The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved. The ship held his whole mind.

"Lord! Look at her," said he.



CHAPTER XXXI

THE SHIP

She had been built on the Chu Kiang in the great Junk building yards that lie just below Canton and her bones had been put together by yellow men. Built to a European design China had come out in her lines just as the curve of the Tartar tent tops still lingers in the roof of the pagoda.

She might have been a hundred and fifty tons, not more, maybe less, and the junk pattern had been eliminated and European sticks and decent canvas substituted for lateen sails by the direction of the man who ordered her and who was a smuggler.

She had been built for swiftness as well as cargo and, her builders having been junk builders since the time of Tiberius, she was a failure, sailing like a dough dish; and the yard that built her, having seen her float off, went on building junks.

Then she passed from hand to hand, and dirty hands they were, from the Chu Kiang to the Hoang Ho, and through the Korea Channel into the Japan sea, trading sometimes, smuggling sometimes, and once, as far as the Kuriles, sealing in forbidden waters. She was caught by the Russians and her crew clubbed to death or sent to the quicksilver mines and then she came back to China, somehow, by way of Vladivostok and was sold and sold again till she fell into the hands of one, Chang, a sea scraper to whom everything came in handy from beche de mer to barratry and murder.

Chang was modern in some of his ideas, he carried a Swenfoyn-harpoon gun and, having luck down by the Sundas, he collected half a cargo of oil which he sold at Perth; from Perth he had dough-dished along down to Kerguelen after the "big seals." He had struck this bay by chance and he had struck oil, for all to westward of it lay a stretch of unwashed rock, as good a sea elephant ground as that on the long beach.

The girl standing beside Raft viewed the scene below her with a catch at the heart. The carcases, the little blood-stained busy men, the try-pots like witches' cauldrons and that strange-looking ship which even to her eyes seemed not as other ships were, all these had a tinge of nightmare. Amongst the men she noted one, big almost as Raft. He seemed their leader.

"Chinks," said Raft, "Chinee—they've got their pigtails rolled up, well, they're better than nothing."

He picked up the bundle that he had laid down and led the way to the slope that gave on the beach.

As they came on to the upper part of the beach the "Chinks" noticed them, paused for a second in their labours and then, finding that it was only a solitary man and woman, went on with their work as though the intruders had been a couple of penguins.

"Cool lot," said Raft.

The girl paused. The sight of the carcases and the blood at close quarters, the absolute indifference of the blubber strippers at the sight of an obvious pair of castaways, the whole scene and circumstance turned her soul and chilled her heart.

"I don't like this," said she. "Those men make me afraid, they don't seem human—they are horrible."

"Wait you here," said Raft.

He advanced alone across the black shingle and she stood watching him and listening to the stones crunching beneath his feet.

His advance did not disturb the workers.

They seemed working against time. Without any manner of doubt they were anxious to be done with the business and be out of that bay before the next blow came, for the place was fully exposed to the west-nor'west and a storm out of there might easily break their ship from its moorings and send her broadside on to the shingle.

Undersized, agile, with weary-old faces that seemed covered with drawn parchment, they seemed less like men than automata; all save the leader, a gigantic, imperious-looking Mongolian with a thin cat-like moustache, a man of the true river pirate type with a dash of the Mandarin. This man held in his hand a long thong of leather. Captain or leader, or whatever he might be, he was most evidently the serang of that labour party.

On the shingle where the ripples washed in lay a boat, half-beached.

The big man was Chang, and as Raft approached harpoon in hand, she saw Chang draw himself up to his full height and stand waiting. Then she heard Raft's voice and saw him pointing at her and inland and then at the ship.

Chang stood dumb. Then all at once he exploded, shouting and gesticulating. She could not make out what he said, but she knew. He was ordering them off. He seemed to be ordering them off the earth as well as the beach. And Raft stood there patient and dumb like a chidden child.

Then she saw Raft nod his head and turn away.

He came back crunching up the shingle. "Sit down," said he.

She sat down and he took his seat beside her. He had dropped the bundle just there, and as he sat for a moment before speaking he noticed that the fish line securing the mouth of the sack was loose, he carefully retied it.

"You saw how that chap carried on," said he, "I had to put a stopper on myself. He's the chap; them little yellow bellies don't count. He's the chap, and I've got to get him aside from the others." He spoke rapidly and she saw that his eyes were injected with blood.

A new fear seized upon her, a fear akin to the dread she had felt that dark night in the cave when she had caught the sound of La Touche dragging himself close to her, the dread of imminently impending action.

"Let us go away," said she, "another ship may come; anything is better than having a fight with those men."

"Have you got that knife safe?" asked Raft. She still wore the fisherman's knife round her waist. She put her hand on it.

"Yes, the knife is safe."

"If that chap downs me for good," said Raft, "stick that knife through yourself. If he doesn't you take my orders and take them sharp."

He had risen to his feet and without a word more he came down the shingle again towards the workers, walking in a leisurely way and trailing the harpoon along.

He approached Chang who turned on him again with the anger of a busy man importuned by a beggar. The most heart-sickening thing to the girl was the way in which, after the first driving off of Raft, the great Chinaman and his crew had gone on with their work as though they were alone on the beach. Pity and humanity seemed as remote from that crowd as from the carcases they were handling. Active hostility would have been less horrible, somehow, than this absolute indifference to the condition of others.

Chang did not wait for Raft to speak, this time; he began the speaking, or, rather, the shouting, advancing on the other who began to retreat. Chang, as if wishing to have done with this matter for good, followed him up and at every step the devil in him seemed to rise higher whilst his voice filled the beach.

What a voice that was! Half-singing, half-booming, the "whant-whong-goom-along" of the running coolie chanting as he runs seemed mixed with it, till, his anger breaking bounds, he let fly with the strap in his hand, catching the other across the shoulder of the arm that held the harpoon.

Then Raft killed him.

The girl who saw the killing was less appalled for the moment by the deed than the doer of it. The blow of the harpoon that sent Chang's brains flying like the contents of a smashed custard apple was like a flash of lightning, it was the thunder that terrified.

Roaring like a sea bull he sprang from the body of Chang towards the crowd who faced him for a moment with their flensing knives like a herd of jackals. The girl, who had sprung to her feet, plucked the knife from her belt and came running, terror gone and a wind seeming to carry her over the shingle; zoned in steel blue light she saw the harpoon flying from right to left destroying everything in its way, knives flying into the air as if tossed by jugglers, a yellow greasy back into which she struck with her knife, a yellow Chinese face falling backwards with eyes wide on her, as if the Chinese soul of the creature she had stabbed to the heart were trying to cling to her.

Then she was sitting on the shingle very ill and Raft was coming back to her, running.

The fight was over and the beasts had flown, left and right, she could see them crawling like ants away up on the higher ground. They had dropped their knives and the knives were lying here and there on the shingle where also lay four dead bodies including the body of Chang.

Ten minutes ago there had been fifteen live Chinamen on that beach.

Raft was bleeding from a cut on the arm, his face was gashed above the beard, a knife had ripped his coat and the back of his left hand shewed another wound.

He was laughing and carrying on like a man in drink and now that her stomach was relieved an extraordinary light-headedness seized her. Like Raft, she seemed drunk.

She had been snatched for a moment into a world where to kill was the only alternative to death or worse than death. For a moment she had lived in the Stone Age, she had fought like a savage animal and with the fury of the female, more terrific than the rage of the male. She had been pushed to the edge of things, and it was she who had turned the fight. The man she had killed was in the act of knifing Raft in the back.

"The boat!" cried Raft.

She struggled to her feet, steadied herself, and came to the boat. They pushed it out till it was nearly water borne; she scrambled in, he followed, and pushed off. Out in the bay the high black cliffs rose above them as if pushed by a scene shifter, the light-headed laughing raving feeling left her, and as they came alongside of the barque to starboard and tied up to the channel plates she was clear headed and calm and able to get on board by the channel without assistance.

On the deck she tottered and fell in the dead swoon of exhaustion.

It is a long journey to the Stone Age and back and the man or woman who makes it is never quite, quite the same again.



CHAPTER XXXII

THE OPIUM SMOKERS

Raft had never seen a female swoon before. He thought for a moment that she had dropped dead and the shock of the business pulled him together like a douche of cold water. Then he saw that she was breathing and took heart, rubbing her hands and poking her in the ribs and calling on her to pull herself together. He would have been more frightened only that he put her condition down to her general unaccountableness in some ways.

In less than five minutes she had come to and was leaning on her elbow and declaring herself to be all right. Then she got on her feet and, taking her seat on the side of the open hatch, looked about her at the dingy deck cumbered with a whale boat and all sorts of raffle. The slight swell of the bay rocked the barque to the creaking tune of block and cordage, whilst overhead the sea-gulls flitted mewing against the vast black cliff that rose three hundred feet sheer from the licking sea.

"You're all right now?" said Raft dubiously.

"Yes, I feel quite right and strong again—just a little dizzy, that's all."

"Mind and don't tumble back down that hatch," said he, "I'll drop below and see what's to be found if you keep your eye out for them Larrikens. Give me a call if you sight them."

The Larrikens were nowhere to be seen; they were in the high ground hidden, and no doubt holding a council of war, but sight or sound of them there was none.

She nodded and he dropped below into the cabin.

The cabin of Chang was clean, almost dainty. Two smaller cabins opened from it, one evidently for Chang and the other for his second in command. Raft in his hurried look round saw a lot of things including a rack containing six rifles and two heavy revolvers resting on an ammunition box filled with hundreds of cartridges. He opened the lazarette beneath the cabin flooring; it seemed well-stored, and on a shelf in the main cabin there were some provisions including a tin of biscuits.

He brought up the biscuits, the two revolvers and a pocketful of ammunition and, taking his seat on the hatch edge beside the girl, opened the tin; then he went forward and hunted for water, found the water cask and, getting a tin pannikin from the galley, brought her a drink.

He had never loaded or fired a revolver; the girl had, and she shewed him how, the echoes of the cliffs answering to the ear splitting reports as he made a few practice shots, and the guillemots squalling and rising in clouds from their perches on the rock.

"We're fixed all right now," said he, "and we can have those chaps on board when they're ready to come."

"On board!"

"Oh, they'll come right enough, they've got no grub on land."

"Come—but do you mean to say you will let them?"

"Who's to work the hooker out of the bay?" he answered, "Not you and me. We've got to get them aboard. There's no harm in them now they're licked."

He spoke with a knowledge of men absorbed from the whole world over. The Chinese were licked and like dogs they would come to heel. He knew it, for he knew men. He had put the fear of God into them, he and the girl; the thing was over. Give the "Chinks" time to lick their wounds and swallow their gruel and they would be right as pie. He had seen a whole ship's company licked by a little man of great will, and in hundreds of experiences and fights he had found that a beaten man, be he strong as ten, is to be led like a child. He was right. Next morning—they slept on deck that night keeping watch alternately—the "Chinks," hungry and starving for a suck at their opium pipes appeared, the whole eleven of them, and coming down the beach like a troop of children stood in a line; then they began to wail.

Wail and wag their heads and wave their hands. Kerguelen, coming on top of the licking, had broken them to pieces. Then the whole lot kow-towed like one man, knees and forehead on the shingle.

Raft got into the boat and rowed off for the beach bringing them aboard four at a time and as each lot reached the deck they kow-towed to the girl and then trotted forward to the fo'c'sle, disappearing like rats, their teeth chattering from exposure during the night, stripped to the waist as they were, and never could one have imagined these little cringing harmless looking men the jackals of the day before.

When the whole lot were in the fo'c'sle Raft gave them time to settle, then he went down amongst them revolver in pocket. They had lit a lamp, some had lit opium pipes and some were lighting them, and they lay about like creatures broken with cold and weariness. He nodded to them and left them to the opium that would drive the chill from their bones, then coming on deck stood beside the girl.

"They'll be able to work the ship to-morrow," said he, "told you they'd be all right; reckon they won't mind changing that big chap I knocked out for us."

"They don't seem to be able to speak a word of English," said she.

"Oh, I reckon I'll do the steering till we get clear of this place," said he, "they'll handle the sails without knowing English and once we're clear we have only to make north till we strike a Christian ship."

"They seem so harmless," she said, "and when I think of that fight—and of what I did—"

"You fought fine—damned fine," said Raft, "damned fine." He put his arm round her, not as a man puts his arm round a woman, but as a shipmate puts his arm round a shipmate.



CHAPTER XXXIII

MAINSAIL HAUL

That night Raft and the girl took it in turns again to keep watch on deck. They might just as well have gone below for all the trouble the crew could have given them. These gentry had fought bitterly because they had been attacked. Raft had frightened them. There is a form of bravery which one might liken to inverted terror. Rats shew it when they are cornered, and so do men. They had seen their boss killed with a blow and the destroyer hurling himself on them and, though they were peaceable men, they fought. These same peaceable men, be it understood, would, all the same, have murdered a human being for profit could they have done so with reasonable safety.

When the girl came on deck in the morning, after her watch below, she found the deck busy and Raft with his hands in his pockets leaning against the port bulwarks and watching the busy ones.

"They're in a thundering hurry to get out," said Raft. "That chap," pointing to a "chink" that seemed a cut above the others and was evidently the mate, "has been pointing to the sky and out there beyond the bay. They seem to smell bad weather coming. I nodded my head to him and he's working the hands now for all they're worth."

"The wind is blowing from the land," said the girl.

"Yes," said Raft, "it'll take us out without towing, unless it changes."

The hatch cover had been put on and the boat brought to the davits, some of the crew were up aloft scrambling about like monkeys, others were making ready to haul on the halyards and a fellow was unlashing the wheel. There was not a face in all the crowd that did not bear the signature of Anxiety writ on parchment.

The fear of weather, the fear of Kerguelen, and the fear of that bay, which was evidently haunted by evil spirits, drove them like a whip.

The mainsail was set to a chorus like the crying of sea fowl and the foresail and jib. The tide coming in held the barque to a taut anchor chain with her stern to the beach and the wind ready to take her. The mate was at the wheel and now from forward ought to have come the sound of the windlass pawls and the rasp of the rising anchor chain. It didn't. From the group of Chinese collected there came, instead, a clang followed by a splash.

"Why, the beggars have knocked the shackle off the chain," cried Raft. "Lord bless my soul, never waited to raise the mud hook?"

"Does it matter?" she asked.

"Sure to have a spare one," answered he, "but it gets me, that's Chinee all over, they're rattled."

"Look!" she cried, "we're moving!"

The cliff's were beginning to glide landward and the bay's mouth to widen, sea-gulls flew with them screaming a challenge, and the guillemots lining the cliff ledges broke into voice, echoes and guillemots storming at them as they went.

Then the sea opened wide under the grey breezy day and the great islands shewed themselves away to the east. To the west and the north all was clear water.

Raft and the girl walked to the after-rail and looked at the coast they were leaving; it seemed horribly near and the great black cliffs only a gunshot away. If the infernal wind of Kerguelen were to arise and blow from the north even now they might be seized and dashed back on those rocks, but the south-east wind held steady and the cliffs drew away and the coast lengthened and new cliffs and bays disclosed themselves, till they almost fancied they could see, away to the east, the great seal beach where the remains of the dead man lay in the cave and where the great sea-bulls were without doubt taking their ease on the rocks.

And now came the last call of Kerguelen, the voice of the kittiwakes:

"Get-away—get-away—get-away."

Raft, as they stood and watched, put his arm over the shoulder of the girl and as she held the great hand that had saved her and brought her so far towards safety her mind, miles away, kept travelling the long road from the caves.

"I'm thinking of the bundle and all the poor things in it," said she, "it will lie there forever on the beach, waiting to be picked up—it's strange."

"I was thinkin' the same thing myself," said Raft, "and the old harpoon I licked that chap across the head with."



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE CARCASSONNE

Raft had found other things than arms and ammunition in the cabin, he had found a box containing nearly three thousand five hundred dollars, partly in American money and partly in English gold coin. Chang had stowed it in his chest, a big cedar-wood affair containing all sorts of oddments, including a can of blue label Canton opium, cigars, a couple of suits of fine silk and a woman's gold bracelet.

Chang had evidently been well-to-do in his way and a man of refinement. His bunk bedding was of the finest quality and on a shelf near the bunk lay piled new-washed sheets and pillow cases. The girl took his cabin and slept in his bunk. Long ago, in the world that was slowly coming back to her, the idea of sleeping in the bunk of a Chinaman she had seen killed would have revolted her, now, it did not trouble her at all. She only knew that a mattress and clean sheets were heaven, even if she had to sleep with a revolver under her pillow. Then in a day or two she only put the revolver there as a matter of routine. The "Chinks" gave evidence that so far from making trouble they were extremely anxious to propitiate and please, and the man who had evidently served Chang appeared in the cabin tidying things and laying out the food, whilst the man who had evidently been mate worked the ship in his own weird way seeming scarcely ever to sleep. He had laid the course almost due north, taking the sun with a back-stick that might have come out of the Ark, working out his calculations in the fo'c'sle in his own head. Raft did not know, he knew nothing of navigation as a science, nor did he care, they were going north and day by day drawing into the track of ships, that was enough for him.

One day the girl said to him: "Suppose these men make trouble over that man you killed—and those others."

"Let them," said Raft, "I'll tell my yarn—it's plain enough—I'm not going to tell no lies. The chap tried to drive us off, and we lost and near done for, and he hit me a welt on top of all. He got his gruel."

She had played with the idea of making up a story for the sake of Raft; she felt ashamed of the idea when she heard his words.

"I'm thinking of that money down below," said he, "it belonged by rights to that big chap. If a ship takes us off we'd better hand it over to the mate or just leave it there for him to take."

"Yes, we don't want the money," she replied, "I have plenty."

"You! Where have you got it?" asked he, looking her over.

"In France," she replied. Then she laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since that day when the sea-bulls had driven the penguins off, and Raft, as though her mirth were infectious, laughed also.

It seemed a joke to him, somehow, the idea of her having money in France.

The idea of her being one of the Rich People had never worked its way into his head. She was just herself, different it is true in some indefinable way from anyone he had ever met, speaking differently, acting differently, but made used to his mind by struggle and adversity. He scarcely thought of her as a woman, yet he was hugely fond of her, a fondness that had begun in pity and had been strengthened and made to grow by her pluck. He liked to have her near him and when she was out of sight he felt a bit astray. He never bothered about the future, so the idea of parting with her had not come to him.

And she? When Raft was out of her sight she felt astray. Her mind had spun between them a tie, of a new sort in a world grown cynical and old and cold; an affection permanent as the hills, warm as summer. Everything good in her loved Raft, it was the affection of a mother for a child, of a child for a mother.

He had nursed her back to life, he had brought her life, and never once since that day had he chilled her with a littleness or broken a thread of what was spinning in her heart. He was illiterate, he was rough, but he was Raft. He was the great beach of Kerguelen and the sea-bulls and the distant islands, he was the hand that had destroyed Loneliness and driven away Death, the child who had listened to Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Lion that had destroyed Chang, the companion in a loneliness ringed with despair.

One morning beyond the 40th parallel, and some two hundred miles to the nor'west of St. Paul, the Chinese mate plucked Raft by the sleeve and pointed into the west.

The day was clear with a wind just enough to fill the sails of the barque and a long blue leisurely swell running from the south. Away in the east was a trace of smoke as though a grimy finger had stained the sky just above the sea-line.

"Ship," said the mate.

It was the one word of English that he knew. Raft was about to shout and run to the cabin hatch to call the girl. Then he held himself back. It might be a false hope. Yet if he had thought he might have known that a ship in the east meant a ship right across their course, here, where there were no trade tracks north and south.

Then above the sea-line and clear of smoke he saw her hull.

He pointed to the halyards and the mate understood. The mate was evidently desperately anxious to be quit for good of his self-invited passengers, for when Raft came on deck again with the girl they found the barque under bare poles rolling to the swell and a Chinese flag half-masted flicking in the wind.

Also, away across the sea, sheering towards them and making to cross their bows a mile away a two funnelled steamer whose funnels closed to one as she shifted her helm to get within speaking distance of them.

She was the Carcassonne, a seven thousand ton freighter carrying passengers, a French boat, bound from Sydney to Cape Town and Marseilles.

Raft, the day before, had taken the Chinese mate down to the cabin and shewed him Chang's money and had presented it to him and the crew in pantomime.

It was honesty. It was also a good stroke. There was no trouble when the Carcassonne, her huge bulk rolling gently to the swell, dropped a boat, though indeed had the companions of Chang wished to raise trouble they would have found themselves seriously handicapped, dumb as they were in every language but their own.

Chang had been their linguist as well as their leader. They had literally lost their tongue.



PART VI

CHAPTER XXXV

MARSEILLES

On board the Carcassonne the girl had broken down as though all the exhaustion she had defied had waited for that moment to fall upon her.

But the energy that had held her above defeat and had given her hope when things seemed hopeless was there, undestroyed, and when the turning point came she rallied swiftly. She came on deck one morning where Bathurst lay a point invisible beyond the blue sea to starboard and sitting in a deck chair made friends with the other passengers.

It seemed to her almost impossible that the same world should hold Kerguelen and at the same time this paradise of azure blue sky and tepid wind.

Raft had told her story before reaching Cape Town and the loss of the Gaston de Paris was now old news in Europe, and the fact that of all the Gaston's crowd only the beautiful Cleo de Bromsart had been saved.

Raft had joined the crew of the Carcassonne, sleeping in the foc's'le, where there were several English speaking sailors, and as much out of his element as a man used only to masts and spars can be on a steamboat. However, he swabbed decks and did odd jobs without a grumble and he was swabbing the deck on the morning she came up; he dropped the business for a moment to take the two hands she held out to him.

All through that time below she had been wanting Raft and his big hand to pull her through. Satisfied, knowing he was on board and all right, but wanting him all the same.

On the old barque once or twice had come the stray thought of how Raft's figure would accommodate itself against the background of the world she knew.

Well, here was the world she knew, or part of it; a deck, clean as a ball-room floor and as spacious, passengers in deck chairs, reading novels, and a manicured French surgeon ready to talk art or philosophy to her, polished, but rather narrow of shoulder.

And against all that stood Raft, rough and in the clothes he had worn on the beach, for there was not a man on board whose clothes would have fitted him comfortably.

Well, he was not incongruous with this background, simply because he destroyed it. In a ball-room it would have been the same. He carried with him his background of high black cliffs and miles of beach and flying gulls and breaking sea, and in a flash came to her the fact that he dwarfed and belittled the other people around just as nature dwarfs and belittles art.

She held both his hands for a moment, managing to pat them, somehow, as she held them, asking him what on earth he was doing with the swab he had just dropped. She had an idea that the ship people had put him to work, but before the idea had risen to indignation heat he reassured her.

"I must be doing," said Raft. "Not that there's much to be at in this old kettle. You've got your legs back, well, that's good. I had it out with that doctor chap and he told me how you were going from day to day, but I've been wanting the sight of you."

He put his hand on her shoulder as he might on a pal's, then he crossed his arms. "And well you look," said he.

"Doctor Petit," said the girl, speaking in French, "this is Raft, the bravest and best man in the world as you will know when I tell you all. Shake hands with him."

The doctor shook hands.

The passengers, and the first officer, across the bridge canvas, watched all this with curiosity. They knew something but they did not know all. They did that night when she had told them as best she could.

After that she met him often on deck, giving him a word or stopping for a chat, and it was now that she began to think and make plans as to the future.

Raft had become part of herself, they were bound together as perhaps no two such contrary beings had ever been bound. The idea of Love, the idea of Marriage, all conventional ideas as between grown-ups of opposite sex were as absurd in relation to them as they would have been in relation to two children who had grown attached one to the other.

As regarded one another they were in fact two children, for Raft had never been anything but a child and Kerguelen and Raft combined had awakened the primitive and the child in her, giving her the power of affection that makes a little child throw its arm round the neck of a dog.

But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cleo de Bromsart.

She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and thinking of this—contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.

Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pass before her mind's eye with her gold eye glasses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries, impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.

She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up, and of the person who can't explain to the person who stands waiting for an explanation.

Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.

They passed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright blue winter's morning they entered the harbour of Marseilles, with Marseilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St. Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St. Nicholas.

Cleo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from the Gaston de Paris. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.

As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst the Carcassonne berthed at the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou'wester. They were old friends.

Then when the hawsers had been passed and the gang plank was being run out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.

Then she was being embraced by Madame de Brie and trying at the same time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come from Paris to receive her.

All this crowd had not come purely on account of Cleo. Beside the people interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince Selm, also his lawyer.

"I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles," said Madame de Brie, "and I have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better things?"

"Oh, my clothes are all right," said Cleo, "people wanted to lend me things, but I am quite comfortable in these."

She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.

Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Marseilles—on their way to Monte Carlo—to meet the Carcassonne and greet the girl who had alone survived the wreck of the Gaston de Paris, some of these people knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it is astonishing how slight acquaintanceship blossoms into full friendship.

Several photographers from the illustrated papers were amongst the crowd and a Pathe operator was on the quay.

Cleo was already recovering that sixth sense, which one might call the social sense, and, as she talked almost to half a dozen people at once, answering questions and receiving felicitations, this sixth sense told her quite plainly that she was being criticised by her felicitators, that in their eyes she was a guy. That the old velour hat she had borrowed, the hair that shewed beneath it, her face, which had still upon it a reflection of Kerguelen, her old skirt and coat—all these things, singly and taken together, were exciting in the minds of these Parisians a pity which was not unrelated to humour. She did not mind, she was looking for Raft.

It seemed to her that all these people, excellent in their way, had a tinge of unreality about them. On the voyage she had sometimes vaguely dreaded that Raft might be pushed away from her, despite herself, by the contrast between him and her own order. It had come to her that the difference between the beach of Kerguelen and the Avenue Malakoff might take her like a giant of mind and divorce her from her allegiance to him. That the good companion, the true friend, the person she loved might alter completely under the touch of social alchemy.

Raft was impossible. She knew that. More impossible even than a sea elephant from that far beach where life was real and Paris a dream. Impossible in Paris where life was false and the far beach a dream.

Raft at a dinner party! Raft at one of those elegant afternoons where the talk would run on the politics of the moment, on symbolism, on Bergson, or Iturrino or the works of Othon Friesz—! He could not be her companion in that place, in that atmosphere, within leagues of those people.

She was not thinking that now. "These people" around her seemed strangers; they had in fact always been strangers, strangers who had kissed her, conversed with her, dined with her, but strangers; the one, true, living, warm friend, the only one she had ever known, was Raft. It was the penguins and sea-bulls over again, the polite, bowing, absolutely correct penguins, the warm lumping, living sea-bulls.

Her heart, chilled by stephanotis-scented kisses, words of felicitation and the fat smiles of men in tall hats and tight-buttoned overcoats, chilled by Monsieur de Brie's gold rimmed eye glasses, chilled by a social state that had never warmed her, cried out for Raft. Kerguelen and that beach, where, even now, the sea-bulls might be lingering, seemed a warm and blissful vision, real, alive, a place where life meant living.

Ah, here he came. He had been helping to fix a hawser at the bows. She ran towards him.

"Ah, there you are. Now, you are coming with me. I have told the captain and he said this morning it would be all right as you were not signed on."

"Right," said Raft, "but where are you going?"

"To an hotel."

He looked about him. He saw the crowd on deck but he did not connect it with her. He was out of his reckoning. He had never thought of what would happen in port as regarded her, or where he would go or what he would do; making plans was not in his way. In the ordinary course of things he would have gone to the British consulate and the Shipwrecked Mariners' people would have returned him, carriage paid, to England. He had always been in the hands of others and of chance.

She—he had always called her She, and here, be it said, he did not know her name, never having asked—She had now taken him into her hands and he felt vaguely that she was a power on this new beach where he was stranded.

Had you told him that she was a woman of society and very wealthy his idea of her power would not have been increased; he knew nothing of wealth or society. She was She in her old dress that he knew so well, and still carrying the sou'wester he had fetched from the cave where she had done that chap in, and as for any idea of being under an obligation to her for food or housing he had none. He would have done the same for her.

Yet, to tell the truth, the docks, with no money in his pocket and the cold prospect of brilliant Marseilles, had made him feel adrift like a lost child. Civilisation had affected him as it had affected her, so that something, now, made him put his hand on her shoulder to get the touch of her, and she, knowing that every eye in all that party behind her was upon them, took the great hand and held it and patted it.

It was as well to take her stand at once, though she was scarcely bothering about that. Then, still holding his hand, she came along that white deck towards the gang-plank. The officers knew and, as they bade her good-bye, they nodded to Raft, but the Parisians knew nothing but that Cleo had gone clearly mad—and that that awful sailor had placed his hand on her shoulder, familiarly!

There were several automobiles waiting by the wharf and Madame de Brie, half-dumb and slightly agitated, having pointed out the car she had reserved for Cleo, the girl introduced Raft.

"This is Raft who saved my life," said Cleo.

Then she took Raft by the arm and pushed him into the seat beside the chauffeur; having done that, she got into the car, following Madame de Brie. The Comtesse de Mirandole got in, also, followed by Monsieur de Brie and his gold eye glasses.

The mistral was blowing so that the windows of the car had to be kept closed.

Used to fresh air, the girl nearly choked at first with the stuffiness of the car. The olfactory nerve is really a prolongation of the brain, as though the brain, distrusting the other senses, had pushed out a trustworthy scout to see what the world and its contents were really like. The sense of smell never lies; it is of all senses the truest and it handed along without comment to the brain of Cleo the faint perfume of the stephanotis affected by Madame de Brie and of the Yoya-yoya affected by the Comtesse de Mirandole, also traces from the varnish and upholstery of the car.

"Who, my dear, is that man," asked Madame de Brie. She had almost said "that dreadful man" but she had checked herself.

"Man—Oh, that is Raft. He saved my life."

"How delightful," said the Countess, "and he seems quite a character."

"Quite," said Madame de Brie half-heartedly, "but my dear Cleo, you will excuse an old woman for suggesting it, your generosity must be on its guard, he placed his hand on your shoulder, quite familiarly it seemed to me."

"Well," said the choking Cleo, "why should he not? I have slept with my head on his chest on a rock and I have stabbed a man who was trying to kill him. Between us we fought a whole crowd of Chinamen. He had a harpoon and I had a knife and we beat them and took their ship. Do you mind having the window a wee bit open? I feel rather faint."

"That's better," said she to the speechless other ones, "I'm so used to fresh air that I can't bear to be closed in."

"But my dear Cleo," suddenly broke out the old lady, "what do you intend to do with him?"

"Do with him? Nothing. He's my friend, that's all. Ah, here we are."

The car had drawn up in the courtyard of the Hotel.



CHAPTER XXXVI

THE LEPER

Dejeuner had been prepared for the party in a private room, a big room, for there were twelve guests all told, including not only Cleo's friends but the business men, and the friends of Prince Selm.

But before thinking of dejeuner or anything else she had to see about Raft.

She left him standing in the hall whilst she interviewed the manager.

Actually, the business would have been easier for her had she brought with her an animal, even of the largest pattern. The manager, when he had caught a glimpse of the intended guest, revolted; not openly, it is true, but with genuflexions and outstretching of hands.

Where could this man be put, what could be done with him? The valets and ladies' maids would certainly not eat with him, the visitors would object to his presence in the lounge, the servants in the servants' quarters. He was a common sailor man. Heavens! What a problem that manager had to face, something quite new, quite illogical, yet quite logical. He had heard of the wreck of the Gaston and he was as interested in Cleo as a hotel manager could be. He understood the whole case when she told him that Raft had saved her life; he was a man of broad mind, but he knew intimately the mental make up of his servants, his visitors and their servants. He discussed the matter with Cleo quite openly and she saw the reason of all he said. Raft was "impossible" in that hotel. His heroism did not count a bit; it did with the manager who would not have to sit at table with him, it did not with the waiters and valets and ladies' maids who would have to associate with him, or the guests whose eyes would be offended by his presence.

"He belongs to a ship," said the manager. Then he solved the question with a burst.

"I will look after him myself." He ran into the hall and called Raft to come with him; then, followed by Cleo, he led the way to a sitting-room, a most elegant sitting-room upholstered in blue silk.