gloomy like a recumbent giant.

The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden;
travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a
ship--a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found.

And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Here
there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The ship
would have to be there, waiting for them.

Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad to
dream of such a thing.

Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as he
stood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, looking
about him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great hump
on the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.

No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she,
the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, never
from the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; before
everything, like a rock, he continued.

Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their "chance,"
that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast,
forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair as
she stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when,
catching sight of something along the high ground to the right he
pointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple of
hundred yards away.

As they drew close to it it enlarged and other things shewed. It was the
top of a skull belonging to a skeleton tucked away in a little hollow as
though it were sheltering from the wind.

Rags of clothing still hung to it and the boots were there still that
had once belonged to it.

"Wonder what did that poor chap in?" said Raft as he stood looking at
it. "Wrecked, most likely and lost himself--well, it's a sign folk have
been here, anyhow."

He gauged the measure of the desolation around by his words. Here a
skeleton did not make the desolation more desolate; on the contrary, it
proved that folk had been here.

So the girl felt.

"He'd have been blown away by this only for that hollow he's in," said
Raft, "well, he's out of his troubles whoever he was and whatever ship
he hailed from."

"We can't bury him," said she.

"He's buried," said Raft.

He had summed up Kerguelen in two words and there was almost a trace of
bitterness in his voice. Beyond the r