“We’re near there,” said Raft. “Hark at the gulls, they’re fighting over the scraps. Them chaps, whoever they are, have been killing seals and boiling the blubber. The bay’s there.”
He pointed to a higher rise in the ground just before them and to the fact that the land from there sloped down inland at a terrific rate.
He was right.
Ten minutes walking brought them to the end of their journey and to the edge of a cliff two hundred feet high. It was as though a giant had taken a gouge and cut a bay right through the sea cliffs. Far across the water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as the one on whose edge they stood.
The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like witches’ cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke. Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.
But the clove in this devil’s mixture was the ship moored in the cliff shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay, barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk. One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old picture of the ships of Drake.
The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved. The ship held his whole mind.
“Lord! Look at her,” said he.