“Sorry to disturb your siesta,” he cried, with a woful assumption of cheery confidence, “but we must reach the shore, if possible, before night falls. Oysters and Chablis await us there. En avant, messieurs et ’dames!”
Nina Forbes sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes.
“I don’t think I can walk another yard. Won’t you leave me here?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Are we to carry that mast with us?”
“Why not? We may need it.”
Her eyes followed Maseden’s down the slope. Compared with the sullen, frowning realm of rock they had quitted, this eastern side of the island resembled a Paradise. The moss on which they were resting was thick and wiry. A hundred feet beneath were fir-trees, sparse and stunted at first, but soon growing luxuriantly, yet promising, to Maseden’s weighing eye, a barrier nearly as formidable as the fearsome wall of rock they had just surmounted.
He knew that which was happily hidden from the others. In this wild land, seldom, if ever, trodden by the foot of man, the forests throve on the bones of their own dead progenitors. Aged trees fell and rotted where they lay, and the roots of newcomers found substance among the heaped-up logs. Gales and landslides helped to swell the mad jumble of decaying trunks, which formed an impassable layer hardly ever less than fifteen feet in depth and often going beyond thirty feet.
Of the two, Maseden believed he would sooner tackle another wall of rock rather than essay to cross that belt of fantastic growths.
But, down there was water—perhaps food—certainly shelter. He guessed that at an altitude where hardy Alpine mosses alone flourished the cold would be intense at night. Already there was a shrewd nip in the breeze. They must not dawdle another instant.