It was all he could say. Yet the salt tears almost blinded him as he spoke.
"Oh, to be an artist!" exclaimed Frank once.
"An artist!" cried Duncan, almost scornfully. "What artist would dare to paint the golden gray and crimson splendour that unites both sea and sky into one living gorgeous whole? Oh, Frank, even Turner himself, were he here, would throw down his brush, and confess that he was a mere caricaturist."
But in a few weeks' time the sunsets were nil, and all, all was day.
Nor did it blow so high now.
Sometimes, indeed, the sea was as calm as a mill-pond, except where rippled in patches by huge shoals of the fry of certain kinds of fish that inhabit these seas.
And these were invariably followed by denizens of the deep that preyed upon them--dancing, leaping, cooing dolphins, for example.
Some of these latter were harpooned, and their dark red flesh made an excellent change of diet from the somewhat salt provisions, eggs, or penguin flesh.
Once or twice, while the weather was calm and the surface of the sea smooth and glassy, they came upon patches of yellow--banks they were, in fact, over which they were drifting.
Men were now kept constantly in the chains, and sometimes the danger was so great that the anchors were let go to wait for even the lightest breeze.