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Updated: May 8, 2025
The transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon had wrought strange distress among my nerves: I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the irrational screaming of the seabirds saddened me like a dirge.
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 seabirds began to wake out on the reefs; their cries sounded in through the open windows. A spasm of joy went through me at this first calling of the birds, and I longed to be out there on the islands myself... The Doctor, once more in good humor, drew the attention of all present. The ladies were never tired of his society. Is that thing there my rival?
Beside, the peculiar condition of the sea immediately about the object revealed its identity. The whale was dead, I was sure. Otherwise it would not have been at the surface so long in such a gale. And being dead, and the seabirds and shark-fish having got at its carcass before the storm, there was good reason for the waves not breaking over it.
Others do their fishing seated on the water; for there are many different kinds of water-fowl here represented gulls, shags, cormorants, gannets, noddies, and petrels, with several species of Anativae, among them the beautiful black-necked swan. Nor are they all seabirds, or exclusively inhabitants of the water.
The wind howls though the hole in the roof, and rude gusts sweep through the forest of pillars producing sonorous sounds, so sonorous, so deep, that one might sometimes almost fancy they were produced by the firing of the guns of a squadron. Flocks of seabirds take refuge in the cavern from the gale, and at intervals, when it lulls, almost deafen us with their screaming.
It was a pleasant afternoon; none of the boys felt any touches of seasickness now, and many of them were walking up and down the deck, some taking their comfort under awnings spread aft near the cabin companion, and some being on the bridge watching the steersman or looking out to sea in search of sails or noting the flight of the gulls and other seabirds or studying the movements of the dolphins playing around the bow, there being many of these lively creatures about.
There was a deep stillness everywhere the island was so desolate that it seemed as though the very seabirds refused to make their homes in the black clefts of such steep and barren rocks. At the entrance of the little cave Gueldmar looked back to the sea. "There's a storm coming!" he announced. "Those clouds we saw this morning have sailed thither almost as quickly as ourselves!"
Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now within a cable's-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting above a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flight of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.
That lasted for half an hour, and then the sail flapped against the mast, and the calm we feared fell. The long swell sank little by little until we floated on a dead smooth sea, under brightest sunshine, with the seabirds calling round us. Nor was there the long line of the Orkney hills to be seen, however dimly, away to the eastward as we had hoped.
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