Chapter Eleven.
The White Whale Shoal.
“What a horrid smell, Hamish! What is it?” cried Steve, going forward.
“Bear’s grease, sir. They’re chust cooking the fat we got yesterday. Like to ha’e some in a pot for your hair?”
“What? Nonsense!”
“Mak’ your whiskers grow, sir,” said the man, grinning. “Look yonder; Watty Links has been for some. Leuk at his head.”
Steve did look, to see that the boy’s red hair was streaky, gummy, and shining, as he had been applying the grease wholesale—that is, with more liberality than care.
For the bear’s fat—some three hundred and fifty pounds’ weight—was in the great caldron surrounded by steam, which hissed beneath it from the engine-boiler as the Hvalross glided slowly along about half a mile from the low, regular ice cliff, which stretched away apparently without end, glittering and displaying its lovely delicate tints of pale blue wherever it was shattered or riven at the edge.
“It does seem rum,” said Steve to himself, “for the sun to be always up—let’s see, what do you call it?—above the horizon.”