time to waste.
The thought of coming back empty handed after all her talk to the men
pursued her. She was looking for food and had found none--nothing but
the star-fish.

The gulls evidently found plenty of food. But for a human being there
seemed nothing, and as she went on and on the thought of what would
happen when those tins in the cave were empty came at her just as the
terror of finding herself alone had come, and this thought was not to be
combated by an effort of will simply because it was born of Reason.

Her clear and practical mind saw starvation, over-leaped the slender
food barrier that held hunger only a month away from them and wandered
in a wilderness where nothing was.

She had reached the rock surface now that stretched away level and
smooth, broken by cracks and pot holes and strewn here and there with
weed. The cliffs had fallen away, giving a view of the broken country
and the mountains with their snow-covered tops, immense, wrapped in
distance under the dull grey day, remote, yet clearly defined in that
air, crystal clear as the air of Iceland.

It was like looking at Silence herself, silence set off and explained
by the beach noises, the sound of the surf, the calling of the terns,
the mewing of the great white gulls.

She saw Kerguelen as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Standing
there alone she saw it for the first time in all its utter nakedness. If
no food were to be found on the busy beach, what food could be found in
that carved, silent, cruel land where not a single tree shewed in all
the miles of desolation?

A stealthy scraping sound behind her made her wheel round.

Up from a rock pond which she had passed without examining had risen a
crab, its body was not bigger than the two fists of a man put together,
yet it moved standing high up like a spider on slender stilts that if
stretched out would have measured four feet or more. She watched it with
dilated eyes as it scrambled and hurried along, vanishing at last like a
spectre in some cleft of the rock. There was something of a skeleton
about it as well as something of a spider, it was like a caricature of
food drawn by Famine. It made the whole beach hideous for a moment and
it made the food hunter almost afraid to go on. She crushed the fear and
went on, reaching a place where the rocks ceased and a broad level of
sand stretched to where the rocks began again and further on the river
ran down.

Where the sand met the fur