Away on the port bow, against a watery blue window of sky, Cape St. Lucas showed, its light-house winking at the dawn. Then came the clang of gulls, starting for the fishing, and moment by moment as they watched, the sea beyond the cape showed sharper, steel-blue and desolate beyond words. The north could show nothing colder, till, all at once, over the hills came colour on a suddenly materialised reef of cloud.
They held their course whilst the day grew broader and the cape fell astern; then, shifting the helm, they steered right into the eye of the sun for the coast of Mexico.
They had turned the tip of Lower California.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE BAY OF WHALES
MAGDALENA Bay, that great expanse of protected water between Punta Entrado and Santa Margarita Island, was once a great haunt of the sulphur bottom whales. Then came the shark fishers and then came the American Pacific Fleet and made a gun practice ground of it, just as they have made a speed testing ground of the Santa Barbara Channel between the Channel Islands and the coast. Maybe that drove the sulphur bottoms to go south all in a body and the more pessimistical ones to commit suicide in a bunch, and all on the same day in the bay once known as the Bay of Jaures and now as the Bay of Whales. For the bones seem all of the same date, ghost-white, calcined by sun and worn by the moving sands that cover them and uncover them and the winds that drive the sands.
Another thing, you find them almost to the foot of the low cliffs that ring the bay. How has this happened? The wind. The wind that can lift as well as drift, the wind that is always redisposing the sands.
The bay stretches for a distance of four miles between horn and horn; the water is strewn with reefs visible at low tide. Emerald shallows and sapphire depths and foam lines and snow of gulls all show more beautiful than any picture; and beyond lie the sands and the cliffs and the country desolate as when Jaures first sighted it. Near the centre of the beach, at the sea edge, stands a great rock shaped like a pulpit.