“Well, then, of course we must find one,” said I cheerily, “and to find one we must get ashore. Let’s have the launch out as soon as possible,” and I walked away to announce his views to the others.
We breakfasted before we set out, while they were setting the boat afloat and getting up steam in her tiny boiler. The ladies had not yet reappeared, so we were all able to voice our emotions and hazard our opinions without fear of making them uneasy. Lessaution as usual led the conversational mêlée.
His knowledge of seismic effects and huge waves produced thereby seemed intimate. He demonstrated that it was an honor to have been associated in this astounding upheaval, whence few had formerly returned alive. He cited instances from Portugal to Polynesia of similar disasters, giving gruesome categories of the demolished. He went into details that turned us from our food. It was only by the show of a universal unbelief in his theories, and a consequent rise of his sentiments to higher planes of passion, that we finally found quiet. He departed on deck furious with our want of intelligence, which he designated as of the most hog-like. We found him all agog for adventure, though still contemptuous, when we rejoined him.
The little oil dinghy was snapping and fussing away by this time, and Gerry, Denvarre, and I tumbled into her with the Frenchman, and were set ashore in five minutes. First of all we ran up the slope between us and the cliff to look seawards.
But for the steam-cloud that hung heavily over the ruined islands six miles away, and for the floating bodies of a few seals and smaller whales, there was no sign of the upheaval of the night before. The sea was lapping sleepily against the ice-smoothed rocks below, gurgling in the crannies, and the sun glittered on a still and radiant surface.
A northwest wind was just beginning to touch the glassy surface, and the floe was swinging back almost imperceptibly toward the cliffs, returning from the distance to which it had been carried by the out-suck. Terns and kittywakes were dipping backward and forward with shrill cries, hovering and quarrelling over the lumps of dead fish and other remnants of the turmoil. Here and there a sea-lion rose out of the depths to roll and play with soft splashings in the sunshine, or to stop and stare up the cliffs at us with stupid, innocent eyes.
The atmosphere was keen and clear as a winter’s day in the Engadine, and we could follow the circling unbroken line of cliffs to the far horizon. There was an exhilarating nip in the air, though the sunlight that poured back from rock and sea made it quiver hazily. It was a glorious day, and would have been an uplifting one if things had not gone so perversely and entirely wrong. For instead of enjoying this heavenly sunshine on the yacht’s deck in lazy contentment, we had to tramp weary miles in search of what might be unattainable.
There was no sort of doubt but that we were in a serious fix. The continuous and implacable wall of rock stretched, for all we could tell, to the world’s end. There was no escape for us except by sea, and we had no proper means of launching out into the deep. We were as surely held, perched up as we were on these desolate summits, as if we had been behind the bars and bolts of a prison.
We walked about four miles along that remorseless line of crags. Never a break did we find, never a vestige of a shallow at its foot. Look where we would was green water unplumbable, and not so much as the suspicion of any shoal that could give us launching room for a boat.
We returned silent and depressed, the full significance of our plight just working into our minds. Even Lessaution, though he really concerned himself little about a departure, which he would have willingly deferred a month at least, was affected by the general dejection, and gave up attempting to instruct us further on our surroundings. Gerry and I added this new weight to our desperation phlegmatically, feeling that the cup of our misery had been full before, and might, for all we cared, run over unstayed. The four of us had much the effect of hounds slinking home out of covert, having been left therein during the run of the season.