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By the time he had thrown his buoy twice, he could hardly advance it a yard beyond his reach; finally it simply slushed along the surface. The sun seemed much hotter in this congestion than in the open sea. Behind him came his two men in a queer snakelike procession of plopping buoys and wriggling bodies. Ahead of them the seaweed stretched, apparently all the way to the schooner.
Menie knew what the queer noise meant, for his father had told him all about seal hunting. It meant that a seal-hole was near, and that a seal had come up to breathe. It was the seal that made the "plopping" noise. Menie tried to keep the dogs still, but they wouldn't be kept still. They ran round with their noses on the snow, giving little anxious whines, and short, sharp barks.
The river Aora, plopping and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry a laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder than a child's toy.
Gradually the invaders thickened and spread over the field; their underbodies took on a grayish tint; and the blue openings narrowed. Finally a sharp shower descended; and the voyageurs sought shelter under a bush, where they hung, watching the millions of drops plopping roundly into the surface of the river; each drop with its attendant sprite leaping at its approach.
But in the present glad hour of restored security his head no longer in danger of plopping, hideously bodiless, into la veuve's basket, his inner-man, moreover, so recently and rackingly evacuated by that abominable Channel passage, now comfortably relined with Tandy's meat and drink he went further in the way of acknowledgment.
Quite a good lot of bullets were plopping into the water, so the Commodore ordered the Colne to lie further out. No one has ever seen so strange a spectacle and I very much doubt if any one will ever see it again. The Australians and New Zealanders had fixed themselves into the crests of a series of high sandy cliffs, covered, wherever they were not quite sheer, with box scrub.
It could try but it couldn't keep him and Ellen here to be burned in their heat-ray bath, or treated to whatever alien torture they had in mind. He felt his shoulder hit. And he knew he'd missed. It was an arm that he struck against, and the arm brought him upright, while a second arm drew back and came forward with a savage right to his jaw. He went out with a dull plopping sound in his brain.
The dining-room is a perfect room, except there is no carpet, and the food was lovely, only I do hate to see a great hand covered with a white cotton glove, plopping a dish down on the lighted thing in the middle, so that one has to look at the next course all the time one is finishing the last one.
Then I saw Remington's face on top, and before they could swing round again I got a good stroke in his neck where it gleamed white in the moonlight. The blood jumped out warm on my hand, and he rolled over so quick that I thought I had killed him. But as I stooped over him he was up like a flash, staggering up the steep beach, his feet plopping and sucking in the water underneath.
Then the body would be lifted up; there would be muttered directions, the wounded man would cry, then the other wounded would also cry after that, there would be the dismal silence again, silence broken only by the shrapnel and the heavy plopping smothers of the rain.
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