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The slow, deep roar of the sea rose solemnly and filled the quiet room. The tide was coming in. They could hear the water shoaling along the beach. How often Avery had listened to it and loved the sound! To-night it filled her soul with awe, as the Voice of Many Waters.
In pursuance of the same error which had led the BELLONA and the RUSSELL aground, they, when the lead was at a quarter less five, refused to approach nearer, in dread of shoaling their water on the larboard shore: a fear altogether erroneous, for the water deepened up to the very side of the enemy's line of battle. At five minutes after ten the action began.
The Bohr, doubtless in obedience to some signal from the shore, steamed up toward the head of Hand Bay as far as the shoaling water would permit, the five steamers loaded with troops closely following her and making as though it was their intention to land the troops upon a small promontory jutting out into the head of the bay.
Then he saw, a hundred yards away, that the bank of the stream fell away until it became a gradually shoaling beach to the water edge. With a shout of hope he raced to this point of vantage and flung himself from the saddle. Then, grasping the rope, he ran into the stream until it foamed with staggering force about his hips.
To connect this with the steamboats wherever the shoaling water might force them to stop, I recommended the use of batteaux or keelboats, a craft which a natural evolution had brought into use in the changeable mountain rivers. They were a canoe-shaped open boat, sixty feet long by eight wide, and were pushed up the stream by quants or poles.
The whole face of the sea around the dock broke into a sort of sputtering. The ocean seemed to boil. To his astonishment, Madden saw the commotion was caused by millions of small fishes leaping and running along the surface. Cries came from all over the dock at once: "Pilchards! Pilchards are shoaling! Pilchards are shoaling!"
He followed the barrier-edge to the south-west for 150 miles and reached lat. 74° 1´ S., long. 22° W. He saw no naked rock, but his description of rising slopes of snow and ice, with shoaling water off the barrier-wall, indicated clearly the presence of land. It was up those slopes, at a point as far south as possible, that I planned to begin the march across the Antarctic continent.
The rain now descended in torrents, lowered topsails on the cap, feeling our way cautiously with the lead; finding the water shoaling, anchored in twelve fathoms; at 0.30 P.M., the weather clearing a little, saw Restoration, bearing South-South-East 1/2 East, and a small island distant about a mile west.
The surf, at the particular spot we steered for, did not break on the shore in a rolling curling wave, as it usually does, but smoothed away under the lee of a small sandy promontory that ran out into the sea, about half a cable's length to windward, and then slid up the smooth white sand without breaking, in a deep clear green swell, for the space of twenty yards, gradually shoaling, the colour becoming lighter and lighter until it frothed away in a shallow white fringe, that buzzed as it receded back into the deep green sea, until it was again propelled forward by the succeeding billow.
Which means, of course, that they will eat it and go to sleep perfectly satisfied with the good fun of fishing; and then lessons are over for the day. The mother, however, has other thoughts in her wise head. She knows that the little ones are not yet tired, only hungry; and that there is much to teach them before the chub stop shoaling and fishhawks must be off to the coast.
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