fanning the victim to dullness with its
wings.

The sea elephants might have noticed that the female creature to whom
they had grown so accustomed appeared little now, a shrinking vision
that every day shortened its wanderings; that it walked differently,
that it seemed more bent. But the sea elephants knew nothing of
Loneliness or its works, nor did they notice, one morning, that though
the sun was shining the figure did not appear at all.

CHAPTER XXII

A NEWCOMER

One morning, brilliant, with the deceptive brilliancy of Kerguelen, a
big man, rough and red-bearded and carrying a bundle slung over his
shoulder, stood on the rocks that formed the eastern point of the great
beach; the sun was at his back and before him lay the seven mile stretch
of sand and rock leading to the far-off Lizard Point.

He was over six feet in height but so strongly built that he scarcely
looked his inches. He was a sailor. The gulls might have told that by
the way he stood, and his eyes, accustomed to roving over vast spaces,
swept the beach before him from end to end, took in the sea elephants
moving like slugs and the seal-nursery and the river and the sands
beyond and the Lizard Point crawling out to sea beyond the sands.

Then he cast his eyes inland.

He wanted to get to the west and he had to choose between seven miles of
broken country or seven miles of easy beach.

The sea elephants were a bar across the beach. He could gauge their size
from where he stood, they looked formidable, but they were less so than
the rocks strewing that broken country. He had climbed over rocks and
gone round rocks and nearly fallen from rocks till rocks had become in
his mind enemies bitter, brutal, callous, and far more formidable than
live things. He chose the beach and came down to it, taking his way
along the sea edge as a person takes his way along a pavement edge,
giving possibly turbulent people the wall.

As he closed up towards the seal beach he kept his eyes fixed on the
great bulls and their families, and the bulls, as he drew closer,
shifted their position to watch him, beyond that they shewed no sign.
Then as he began to pass them he recognised that he had nothing to fear,
the females alone, here and there, shewed any sign of disturbance,
shuffling towards him with wicked eyes, rising on their flippers, but
always sinking down and shuffling back as he went on.

Further along, though followed and met by a hundred pairs of