They had reached the highest point and before them, away to the west, stretched the same rolling dark-smooth country, making low cliffs at the sea edge and then, as if weary of little things, springing gigantic and bold towards the sky.
“It’s over there the bay would be,” said Raft. “Ponting said it was a black brute of a bay between two cliffs rising higher than a ship’s top masts. Well, there’s our chance before us—if you call it a chance. It’s a long way, taking it how you will.”
Chance! Despite her optimism and belief in being led, as she stood now with the wind blowing in her face it seemed to her that she stood before absolute hopelessness.
Nothing, not even the sea corridor, had balked her like that terrible distance, calm, sunlit, yet gloomy like a recumbent giant.
The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden; travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a ship—a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found.
And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Here there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The ship would have to be there, waiting for them.
Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad to dream of such a thing.
Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as he stood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, looking about him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great hump on the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.
No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she, the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, never from the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; before everything, like a rock, he continued.
Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their “chance,” that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast, forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair as she stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when, catching sight of something along the high ground to the right he pointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple of hundred yards away.