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Updated: May 8, 2025
"Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours," he said, with a sweep of the hand; "and over there, some four miles," pointing in another direction, "lies S Bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea, haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the house are the plantations and pine-woods.
It was a long, low, sandy atoll, with a few cocoanut-palms growing in the centre of it, and with the exception of a vast colony of seabirds that apparently made it their headquarters, the island was devoid of life. The bloodthirsty McGuffey stood at the break of the poop, and as he gazed shoreward he chuckled and rubbed his hands together. "Great, great," he murmured.
Here was a ridiculous thing: one man and a slip of a girl fighting and defying a battle-ship. The smoke of battle covered miles of the great gulf. Even the seabirds shrieked in ridicule. This went on for three days at intervals. With a fine chagrin Richambeau and his men saw a bright camp-fire lighted on the rock, and knew that Ranulph and the girl were cooking their meals in peace.
The West Coast of Scotland is something like that nature in a general way, except that it is infinitely smaller and less grand; but that constant, bright blue sky, those deeply-indented, sinuous, gleaming friths, those headstrong rivers and headlong falls, those steep hillsides, those long ridges of fells, those peaks and needles rising sharp above them, those hanging glaciers and wreaths of everlasting snow, those towering endless pine forests, relieved by slender stems of silver birch, those green spots in the midst of the forest, those winding dales and upland lakes, those various shapes of birds and beasts, the mighty crashing elk, the fleet reindeer, the fearless bear, the nimble lynx, the shy wolf, those eagles and swans, and seabirds, those many tones and notes of Nature's voice making distant music through the twilight summer night, those brilliant, flashing, northern lights when days grow short, those dazzling, blinding storms of autumn snow, that cheerful winter frost and cold, that joy of sledging over the smooth ice, when the sharp-shod horse careers at full speed with the light sledge, or rushes down the steep pitches over the crackling snow through the green spruce wood all these form a Nature of their own.
With this, weighted by bullets, he contrived a casting-net and caught a lot of small fish in the lagoon. At first they were unable to decide which varieties were edible, until a happy expedient occurred to the girl. "The seabirds can tell us," she said. "Let us spread out our haul on the sands and leave them.
"We are going to have a change, Dick," the doctor said, as he stopped by the lad, who was leaning against the bulwark watching a flock of seabirds that were following a shoal of fish, dashing down among them with loud cries, and too intent upon their work to notice the ship, lying motionless a hundred yards away. "What sort of a change, doctor?"
The great chamber was silent as a mausoleum in the intervals between the clashing and tinkling of gold and stones in the chest; from the outside, by way of the rock tunnel, came only the sigh and murmur of the crooning breeze, the softened plash of the tide on the shore, the scream of wheeling seabirds. All sound of the schooner had departed; there was no human note in the whole region.
In the harbor a few still sat like seabirds drying plumage. Against the explosive whiteness of wind clouds, their sails looked like wrinkled parchment, or yellowing Egyptian cloth; the patches were mysterious hieroglyphs.
On the 19th at noon by my account we were within twenty leagues of Port Desire; but the wind blowing fresh from the north-west with thick foggy weather I did not attempt to make the land. We passed a good deal of rock-weed and saw many whales, and albatrosses and other seabirds. Thursday 20. On the 20th at noon our latitude was 50 degrees 24 minutes south and longitude 65 degrees 50 minutes west.
Who was down there under the blue water, with the hoarse, hollow voice, urging and pushing them across the beach to her feet? And what was there beneath the sea, and beyond the sea, so deep, so broad and so dim, away off where the white ships, that looked smaller than seabirds, were gliding out and in? But while Mary Louise stood still and wondered, there came a low rippling laugh to her ear.
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