"If they all set on a man he wouldn't have much chance," he said, with a shiver. "They could pick him clean before he knew where he was."
"It's only dead men they feed on," said Macro, quite himself again, since it was only birds they had to deal with and not disembodied spirits. "There's land. Let's get ashore," and they crawled precariously along over the wreckage, which sagged and dipped beneath them in places, and in places towered high and had to be scaled as best they could, and at times they had to wade or swim from pile to pile.
Amazing things they chanced upon in their course, but were too intent on reaching land to give them more than a passing glance or a shudder. More than once they came on bones of men, jammed in tight among the raffle, and slowly picked by the sea and the things that lived in it till they gleamed white and polished and clean. And their grinning teeth, set in the awful fixed smile of the fleshless, seemed to welcome them as future recruits to their company.
"Ah—ah! So you've come at last!" they seemed to say, as they laughed up at them out of holes and corners. "We've been waiting for you all these years and here you are at last."
There were, too, bales and boxes of what had been rich cloths and silks and satins and coarser stuffs, worried open by the fret of the sea and reduced to sodden slimy punk, and casks and barrels beyond the counting.
"Wastry! Wastry!" panted Macro. "We'll come back sometime, mebbe."
But, for the moment, their only craving was for dry land, to savour the solid safety of it, and get something to eat if they could, and a long long rest.
With desperate determination they dragged their sodden and weary bodies through the shallows beyond, and blind fury filled them with spasmodic vigour as they saw what the sea-birds were feeding on.
Over each poor body the carrion crew settled like flies, and tore and screamed and quarrelled. The two living men dashed at them with angry shouts, and the birds rose in a shrieking host amazed at their interference. But only for a moment. They came swooping down again in a gray-white cloud, with raucous cries and eyes like fiery beads, and beat at them with their wings, and menaced them with already reddened beaks. And they looked so murderously intentioned that the men were fain to bow their heads and run, with flailing arms to keep them off.
And so at last to dry land, and grateful they were for the feel of it, even though it seemed no more than a waste of sand but a few feet above tide-level. That last tussle with the birds had drained their strength completely. They dropped spent on the beach and lay panting.