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Updated: June 22, 2025
They cut swiftly through the water, heeling far over under their queer lateen sails, like hungry sea-birds that sweep the waves with one wing-tip in their search for booty.
This harsh treatment, in fact, so disgusted Johnny with the whole race of sea-birds, and so impaired his faith in their innocent and inoffensive looks, that he declared he would never have any thing more to do with them, "since that beautiful white bird had bitten him so savagely, when he only offered to stroke its neck."
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead.
But his fortitude, which bore up heroically against his personal danger, was not proof against the dreary influences of Valdemosa in bad weather, the fogs, the sound of the hurricane sweeping through the valley, and bringing down portions of the dilapidated building, the noise of the torrents, the cries of the scared sea-birds and the roar of the sea.
Not a breath of wind stirred the little flag that drooped from the mizzen-peak, and the clamorous, ceaseless-cries of sea-birds, added to the merry shouts and laughter of the men as they followed the restless football, rendered the whole a scene of life, as it was emphatically one of beauty.
The Angakok was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again in a natural voice. "When I opened my eyes in my own igloo again," he said, "the famine was already over. Flocks of sea-birds were flying overhead. The sea swarmed with fish, and with walrus and seal. Every one along the whole coast was happy. Ask yourselves is it not so?"
And there on the shore he saw a bunch of little men, little women and littler children, all with smoke-colored skins, all with but one eye in their heads, all crying and screaming at each other like sea-birds, and all sitting round a fire of dried water weeds, cooking and eating eels and crab-apples.
Some bestrode fishes glinting dusky gold, Or angry crimson, or chill silver bright; Others jerked fast on their own scanty tails; And sea-birds, screaming upward either side, Wove a vast arch above the Queen of Love, Who, gazing on this multitudinous Homaging to her beauty, laughed.
At one point there was quite a cave, the floor of which would be some twenty feet above high-water mark, and its roof about the same distance higher. It appeared to penetrate some distance into the bowels of the mountain, and was wide and roomy. Sea-birds in great numbers hovered around its entrance, finding it, no doubt, an ideal nesting-place.
These words spoken by Burkett again revived my hopes. Still not a sound reached us. We could distinguish no signal from the shore to give us hope. Blacker and blacker grew the night. More keenly whistled the wind. The sea-birds' shriek, echoing it seemed from the caverned rocks, sounded like a funeral wail.
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