“Can I be of any use?” he asked, with extraordinary politeness, and I got a look between the eyes which told me I was taking more than mere courtesy demanded.
She smiled sweetly at him, took his arm, and began to step uncertainly toward the saloon. Then she stopped suddenly and turned toward me again.
“Thank you,” she said, looking over her shoulder, and went on. But I never heard the words said quite like that, I think, for I could have kissed her feet for them, as well as have cursed her for a heartless coquette.
As they disappeared I began to look up the others. Rafferty and Waller were blinking like owls, and slapping themselves, inquiringly. They had been tumbled off the bridge like shot pheasants, and had been flung down upon us as we spluttered and squirmed among the splinters. What with the fall and hitting hard wood they were pretty considerably knocked out of time. Lessaution was gesticulating wildly, asserting that he had swallowed salt-water by the hectolitre. Forgetting to close his astonished mouth when the wave struck us, he had engulfed it to the full extent of his capacity, and he condemned it as the most poisonously cold draught that had ever been forced upon him. But even this had failed to subdue his jubilation at having attained to the heights of his desire. Garlicke, who had been stunned and over-dosed with neat whiskey, was coughing like a sick sheep, and the sympathetic Janson was slapping him on the back. Poor Eccles was being slowly extracted from below the bowsprit with a broken collar-bone, but was bearing lip against his affliction with a Scotch impassiveness and a fat spirit-flask. He, it appeared, was the only item in the list of casualties.
He and his underlings crept back to the stoke-hole and reported it three feet deep in water, but the fires not wholly drowned. The shaft was still workable, and by a little stirring of the clinker they gave us enough steam to stay our vague circlings on our lake. We backed, as we drifted shoreward, and swung the lead. We found twenty fathoms. So there in the centre of that new-formed sea-pond we anchored, amidst an arid expanse of rockbound desolation, and left discussion of our unpleasant situation for drier circumstances. All hands slipped below to find such changes of raiment as had been left unsoaked, and to rectify if possible some of the more desperate confusion of saloon and cabin. And thus ended that wondrous half-hour of terror and upheaval.
The dawn was breaking when we reassembled on deck to look round us. Over the cliff-top behind us we could still see the island volcano belching smoke and steam, but it was half the height it had stood the night before. The lake on which we floated was about a mile long and half-a-mile broad. It was bounded on the landward side by huge basaltic crags that shot up ragged and desolate against a steel-blue sky.
To the right a rocky plain spread flat and unbroken for a mile or so, terminating in uneven, boulder-strewn slopes. These were gashed and riven in all directions by the clefts that ran black and shadowy into the depths of the hill. To the left was a giant mountain, and down its flanks crept river-like a stupendous glacier, our lake lapping its blue crevasses at the nearer end. The water completely hid any moraine there might have been before the irruption of the whelming wave. Between us and the tops of the sea-cliffs was a narrow strand of rock, covered with the silt of the retreating waters. Among the litter the bodies of one or two sea-lions and seals were visible, their fur shining wet and glossy in the light of the rising sun. On the shore beneath the far cliff a whale was stranded, thwacking his huge tail resoundingly upon the boulders as he vainly tried to thrust himself back into his native element. Around us on every side great masses of sea-fowl swung and wreathed themselves in white circles, filling the air with their cries and their droppings, pouncing ever and again on the dead fish and garbage that covered the surface, fighting and howking clamorously at each other for the spoil.
It did not need a critical examination to show that we were in a trap. The wave had borne us over the cliffs a hundred feet at least above tide-level, and now they stood implacable between us and any chance of an escape seaward. Here we were in a six hundred ton ship afloat in less than six hundred acres of water. It was not an exhilarating prospect.
Naturally I turned to Waller in this seeming impasse. Of all the good men who walk this uncertain earth of ours, I know none who inspire confidence to the same extent as do those who go down to the sea in ships. Their profession demands that they should briskly and at uneven intervals extract themselves—or, more often others—from the tightest of tight places. They fight the outrageous tactics of the wind and sea with happy confidence. They defeat these eternal adversaries with no sort of pride in their victories, but with painstaking completeness. And when occasionally to them comes the overthrow, they meet it with a cheer. To us of the land-lubbing profession they are, in their supreme cocksureness, as little gods.
“Well, my lord,” said the captain succinctly, “it’s evident that before this southern summer’s over we must send word to the Falklands. The ice will close down on us in March. We can’t move the ship. We must send a boat. It is a question of finding a place to launch it. As far as one’s eye goes there’s nothing but a precipice for miles. We could perhaps arrange pulleys to let the cutter down, but it would be difficult. It would be easier to take her a few miles on rollers. I submit that the crying necessity at the present moment is an outlet to the sea.”