“I always had a notion that the New York Fire Department was a pretty nervy proposition,” he informed all and sundry during a halt on the only strip of open beach yet encountered in their new exploration, “but I guess I can show the chief a few fresh stunts first time I blow into headquarters on East Sixty-seventh Street.”
Sturgess’s airy references to New York were excellent tonics. He refused to regard that great city and its ordered life as dreamlike figments of the imagination. To him the flaring lights of Broadway ever glimmered above the horizon. Had he sighted the Statue of Liberty around the next bend that would mean reality; this, the dreary expanse of dead hills, water and black rock, would have been the dream.
Maseden, recovering his poise, had resumed his everyday air of well-grounded optimism. At any rate, he argued, the four of them were living and uninjured. They still owned those thrice-precious cartridges, the rifle and the poncho. They had many hours of daylight before them, and would surely find drinkable water and food before dark.
Happily the weather was fine, though clouds banking up in the west told of a possible gale, which might blow itself out in a few hours, or last as many days, or weeks. In that climate there was no knowing. The almanac declared that it was high summer, yet it would be no uncommon event if a snowstorm came from the southwest and mantled all the land a foot deep.
As for their clothes being wet, these young people thought little of such a trifle. Their skins were becoming, in the expressive Indian phrase, “all face.”
So they trudged on, heading for the mouth of the defile. In the far distance they discerned the broken line of another mountainous island, the lower slopes black with forests.
“That’s a good sign, folk,” said Maseden, smiling cheerfully once more. “We’re making for a timber belt. When you come to think of it, trees simply couldn’t grow on these rocks, and the watershed seems to fall away on both sides of the gorge, which must have been cut by an earthquake.”
His eyes had been searching constantly for signs of the raft’s wreckage, but never so much as a splintered log could he see. Nina, not so preoccupied, was gazing farther afield.
Suddenly she stopped, and something in her manner arrested the others.
“I don’t think I’m mistaken,” she said, “but are not those two points the flanks of these islands?”