Just as they were rolling back the casks under the shelter of the tent, Maurice Negus rushed up to Mr Meldrum in company with Florry, both of the children being intensely excited evidently about something they had seen or heard.
“Oh crickey!” cried out the former before he had quite got up to the party, so as to have the first voice in the matter,—“Do come! There’s an awful long thing just crawled out of the sea, and it is creeping up to the tent as fast as it can!”
“Yes,” chorussed Florry, “and it’s like the seals we saw in the Zoological Gardens; only it’s twice as big and has a long trunk like an elephant!”
“Jeehosophat!” exclaimed Mr Lathrope, feeling for his revolver. “It must be a rum outlandish animile, if it’s like that!”
“Zee-oliphant,” said Karl Ericksen, the Norwegian sailor, in his broken English. “He is not harmful:— he good for man eat.”
“Snakes and alligators! that’s prime anyhow, I reckon,” put in Mr Lathrope. “I guess this air animile’ll save your old stores, mister, hey?”
“I hope so,” answered Mr Meldrum. “Although I’ve never tasted seal beef myself, I have heard it’s very fair when you can’t get the genuine article; the whalers generally use it, at all events, some of them even thinking it a dainty. But, let us go and see this sea-elephant that the children have discovered!”
They did not have to go far; for, the queer-looking amphibious creature had by this time crawled up on to the rocks close outside the tent, and was quite near to where they were standing—the Norwegian sailor having already seen and recognised its species before he spoke.
The animal was a gigantic sort of seal, some twenty-five feet in length and quite five high. If big, it was certainly also most unwieldy, for it appeared to waddle up from the shore with the greatest difficulty. Its body was covered with a short brown fur, with lighter hair of a dun colour under the throat; and, what gave it the singular appearance whence its name of “sea-elephant” was probably more derived than from its size, was the pendulous nostrils, which hung down over its mouth, just like the proboscis or long trunk of the children’s old friend, “Jumbo.”
Karl Ericksen had managed to rummage out a harpoon one day amongst the odds and ends in the forecastle of the Nancy Bell, and the sailor having been familiar with its use from long whaling experience, had not forgotten to bring it ashore when they abandoned the wreck—looking upon the weapon with almost as much veneration as Mr Lathrope regarded the rifle he had inherited from the celebrated Colonel Crockett.