CHAPTER IX
THE WOOLEY
It was the wind. The Wooley, which is the fist of Kerguelen suddenly clenched and hitting out from the shoulder of the great islands now suddenly stormed about with foam and veiled in spray.
Half stunned, she twisted round, still lying but fronting it now with her arm protecting her face. The beach had loudened up in thunder from end to end but the yelling Wooley as it met the cliffs and howled inland almost drowned the thunder of the waves. Then it died down as suddenly as it had come, and the boom of the surf rose high, as the girl, gathering herself together, got up and struggled on.
She was no longer thinking of her hair. It was the first lesson of the school of Kerguelen. “Here you shall think of nothing but the moment, of the ground beneath your feet, of the bite you put in your mouth, of the rock that stands before you.”
When she reached the cave with her petticoats thrusting about her she was met by the two men and as she came up to them La Touche was cursing the wind. The Wooley had all but blown him down too. He had got up sooner than Bompard and had received the full face of it “in the pit of the stomach.” He seemed to look on it as a personal matter affecting him alone.
Even as he spoke a sudden calm fell, lasted for a moment, and was followed by a howl from inland.
At a stroke the wind had changed right round and was blowing now from the mountains. Here in the shelter of the cliffs they scarcely felt it but the shift had raised an appalling cross sea. Right away to the islands there was nothing but tumbling foam, waves standing up and fighting waves in a battle that spread for leagues.
“It’s well for us we didn’t fall in with this yesterday,” said Bompard “a ship couldn’t stand it.”
“And what ship will ever poke her nose in here to take us off do you think?” asked La Touche. “This is what you get every day of the week, if all accounts are true—this, and worse. I tell you we’ve come to the wrong place. There’s no getting over it. We’ve come to the wrong place.”