I wanted badly to sleep that night, but apparently the others had different views. The sand was soft and dry, and a shallow hole scooped in it for my hip and a heap for my pillow, with a blanket spread over all, made a couch fit for a Sybarite, especially after the battering my bones had received on board the cutter. Du Toit was already snoring when I snuggled down, but I was far too used to his basso profondo to let that keep me awake, and was just dropping off when the skipper started an interminable argument with one of the other men on some weird technicality connected with the sealer’s craft, and kept it up apparently for hours. I did not like to interrupt them, but time after time, just as I got fairly under way, their voices woke me. I saw the big camp fire of driftwood sink and die down till nothing but a few embers remained; I saw the late moon rise and flood the wide solemn sea of dunes with mysterious light, saw the shadowy slinking forms of two or three jackals sneaking about, less than a stone’s throw away; heard the soft, soothing swish of the waves on the beach, and Du Toit’s solo; but above all came this incessant wrangle.
At last I called out to the skipper, “Look here, Jim, when are you fellows going to shut up? It must be nearly morning, and I want to sleep!”
“Sleep?” said he. “Great Scott! why, I thought you’d never want to sleep again! Why, man, you slept all the way from Luderitzbucht here! Sleep? Why, you never opened your eyes all the way!”
“That was sea-sickness,” I said, “not sleep—sea-sickness!”
“Must ha’ been sleeping-sickness,” he chuckled, and the two other asses chuckled too, and repeated his attempt at a witticism over and over again with fresh chuckles till I got too ratty to do anything but swear. And still they smoked, and talked, and yarned; until at length, in sheer desperation, I grabbed my blankets and, with a parting benediction that must have kept them warm till morning, cleared away out of earshot, scraped a fresh couch out with a swipe of my foot, snuggled up in my blankets and went to sleep instantly.
I awoke shivering, for as usual along the coast the early morning had brought a dense sea-fog that enveloped everything, and had soaked my blankets through and through. It had been to guard against this drenching “Scotch mist” of a fog that we had erected the bucksail shelter, from which Jim and his co-idiots had driven me, and under which I now found them snoring in feeble opposition to Du Toit. They were snug and dry, but the big sail above hung bellying down with its soaking weight of accumulated moisture, whilst the guy-ropes were stretched taut for the same reason.
SEALERS AT OLIFANTS ROCKS.
The only white man (Irish) is the man standing behind.
