At the foot of the barrier an eddy rose now and again, creaming white among the reefs that broke the sheen of the pool. This was where some subterranean entrance must keep the waters to tide-level. Now and again the shining poll of a sea-lion gleamed upon the surface, another proof that a sea-cave communicated with the outside. Opposite, on the eastward side of the bay, were cliffs as steep as those among whose pinnacles we stood, and the lake swept away inland and was lost behind a spur of the mountain-side.
This was an unexpected obstruction to our travel, and put a final stop to any idea of getting our launch to the sea from a beach. We turned to the left along the glacier edge to see what was hid from us by the flank of the hill, scrambling alternately from rock to ice. In about twenty minutes we reached the corner and rounded it. Then we saw the far end of the inlet.
Half-a-mile further on, shining and yellow below us, was a beach of sand wet with the receding tide. Streaked across it were many little rivulets, draining either from the glacier, or from sea-pools that filtered slowly through the ooze of the shore. Scarcely a ripple broke the calm. It sank down the beach, drooping imperceptibly without any of the roll that usually marks the defiant outgoing of the ebb. An oily stillness lay upon the waters.
Dotted on the strand were various black objects, some larger, some smaller, but too far distant to be distinguishable. The smooth silt ran upward between narrowing cliffs, merging into the rock rubble that climbed the mountain-side. It lost itself among the crags of the summit.
Clouds of terns and kittywakes were wheeling in the air, or strutting and scratching on the beach; the larger birds—gulls, cormorants, and such-like—were pecking and fighting over the black objects, while in solemn battalions the penguins marched and countermarched along the water’s edge.
Under the circumstances the view took the nature of an ironical jest at the hand of fate. Here at last was the very object of our search, but mocking us in the very act of discovery. A beauteous, slow-sloping shallow of lovely sand, and no outlet to the sea. The ideal place to launch our cutter, and the barrier of the cliffs lay between us and the outer ocean impenetrable.
I swore softly to myself as I realized these things, cursing the luck that dogged me maddeningly. Fate had evidently willed that I should not escape from my jealous torments yet awhile.
Gerry broke the silence.
“This place means to keep us now it’s got us, you may depend upon it,” said he. “That’s what I call a pretty strict blockade of their only port,” and he pointed down the fiord to the barrier at the far end where the rocks were piled across the entrance.
“The earthquake may have done that,” said I.