the high
lands and gulls rising above the cliff edge flitted like birds born of
snow and fire.

They stopped for ten minutes to breakfast, then they went on, and now
suddenly came something new. On the wind they could hear the sound of
gulls quarrelling, a sound quite distinct from the ordinary mewing and
wheezing of the gulls at peace.

"We're near there," said Raft. "Hark at the gulls, they're fighting over
the scraps. Them chaps, whoever they are, have been killing seals and
boiling the blubber. The bay's there."

He pointed to a higher rise in the ground just before them and to the
fact that the land from there sloped down inland at a terrific rate.

He was right.

Ten minutes walking brought them to the end of their journey and to the
edge of a cliff two hundred feet high. It was as though a giant had
taken a gouge and cut a bay right through the sea cliffs. Far across the
water of the bay before them the land rose again in a precipice steep as
the one on whose edge they stood.

The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily
reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like
witches' cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke.
Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being
cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the
waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.

But the clove in this devil's mixture was the ship moored in the cliff
shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay,
barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk.
One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old
picture of the ships of Drake.

The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved. The ship held his
whole mind.

"Lord! Look at her," said he.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE SHIP

She had been built on the Chu Kiang in the great Junk building yards
that lie just below Canton and her bones had been put together by yellow
men. Built to a European design China had come out in her lines just as
the curve of the Tartar tent tops still lingers in the roof of the
pagoda.

She might have been a hundred and fifty tons, not more, maybe less, and
the junk pattern had been eliminated and European sticks and decent
canvas substituted for lateen sails by the direction of the man who
ordered her and who was a smuggler.

She had been built for swiftness as well as