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So low was our roof, the deck, that the crown of Walter's cap touched it, and Mr Clare had to bend his neck when he moved about. The square, dwarf windows looked out on nothing but jagged rocks and rolling blue waves.
Jones swung himself over, wrapped his leg around the rope, and came down, to hit the ground with a thump. Then, lassos in hands, we began clambering over the broken fragments. For a few moments we were lost to sights and sounds away from our immediate vicinity. The bottom of the cove afforded hard going. Dead piñons and cedars blocked our way; the great, jagged stones offered no passage.
His food was almost gone now although he had husbanded it with the greatest care. But he tightened his belt and kept on. On the morning of the second day he was crossing a small brook and was just stepping up on the other side when a wet stone rolled beneath his foot and threw him headlong. His head struck a jagged stump and he lay there stunned.
I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of ulva latissima; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the jar.
Dicky's hand was, on his pistol, for his first impulse had been to shoot the rawbone; but it dropped away in sheer astonishment at the sight of this strange figure in threadbare dirty clothes and riding-breeches made by shearing the legs of a long pair cut with an unsteady hand, for the edges were jagged and uneven, and the man's bare leg showed above the cast-off putties of a policeman.
The incident merely showed how raw and jagged the Great Retreat had left the nerves of those who survived it. An hour's halt passed only too soon, and its later moments were made uneasy by the instinctive aversion which every one felt for the sound of the whistles that would mark the end of it.
One cliff is like another in its jagged nakedness; one abysm dark and empty as another. Perhaps I wander in a circle. Perhaps this brown hand is leading me wildly astray, this hand whose grasp has penetrated my flesh, and has grown into it like the fetter of a slave. Suddenly I am alone. I do not know how it came to pass. I drag myself to a peak and look about me.
She was found the next morning lying dead on a little beach, having bled to death from the wounds she had received from the jagged coral rocks, but the baby was alive, for with her dying hands the poor creature had placed it under shelter, and covered it over with grass and leaves, where it was found, sleeping soundly, by a native sailor.
To the right the road wound round a great jagged shoulder of rocky cliff, and clung to it closely; for on the left there yawned a black space, the valley of Maunahoehoe, and, as he rode, Prout could see the glimmer of the natives' fires below fires that, although they were but distant a few hundred feet, seemed miles and miles away.
A clay-bank filly came instantly to it, but with a sudden impulse he closed it abruptly, and set out on foot along a narrow, brambly path that wound down the mountain side. He had descended almost to its base before the threatening appearance of the sky caught his attention. A dense black cloud had climbed up from over the opposite hills, and stretched from their jagged summits to the zenith.
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