“Ah, ha!” the boatswain used to say then. “He is asking us up! If only he could give me the loan of his wings I would willingly undertake to fly up there, and look over the other side. Very likely that side of the coast isn’t any better than this one, but at any rate we would know.”
Know? Did they not know already, since Fritz had seen nothing but the same arid rocks and the same inaccessible heights beyond the bluff?
One of the albatross’s chief friends was little Bob. A comradeship had promptly been established between the child and the bird. They played together on the sand. There was no danger to be apprehended from the teasing of the one or the pecking of the other. When the weather was bad both went into the cave where the albatross had his own corner.
Serious thought had to be given to the chances of a winter here. But for some stroke of good fortune they would have to endure four or five months of bad weather. In these latitudes, in the heart of the Pacific, storms burst with extraordinary violence, and lower the temperature to a serious extent.
Captain Gould, Fritz, and John Block talked sometimes of this. It was better to look the perils of the future squarely in the face. Having made up their minds to struggle on, they no longer felt the discouragement which had been caused earlier by the destruction of the boat.
“If only the situation were not aggravated by the presence of the women and the child,” Captain Gould said more than once, “if we were only men here——”
“All the more reason to do more than we should have done,” Fritz rejoined.
One serious question cropped up in these anticipations of the winter: if the cold became severe, and a fire had to be kept up day and night, might not the supply of fuel give out?
Kelp was deposited on the beach by every incoming tide and quickly dried by the sun. But an acrid smoke was produced by the combustion of these sea-weeds, and they could not make use of them to warm the cave. The atmosphere would have been rendered unbearable. So it was thought best to close the entrance with the sails of the boat, fixing them firmly enough to withstand the squalls which beset the cliff during the winter.
There remained the problem of lighting the inside of the cave when the weather should preclude the possibility of working outside.