cargo and, her builders
having been junk builders since the time of Tiberius, she was a failure,
sailing like a dough dish; and the yard that built her, having seen her
float off, went on building junks.

Then she passed from hand to hand, and dirty hands they were, from the
Chu Kiang to the Hoang Ho, and through the Korea Channel into the Japan
sea, trading sometimes, smuggling sometimes, and once, as far as the
Kuriles, sealing in forbidden waters. She was caught by the Russians
and her crew clubbed to death or sent to the quicksilver mines and then
she came back to China, somehow, by way of Vladivostok and was sold and
sold again till she fell into the hands of one, Chang, a sea scraper to
whom everything came in handy from beche de mer to barratry and murder.

Chang was modern in some of his ideas, he carried a Swenfoyn-harpoon gun
and, having luck down by the Sundas, he collected half a cargo of oil
which he sold at Perth; from Perth he had dough-dished along down to
Kerguelen after the "big seals." He had struck this bay by chance and he
had struck oil, for all to westward of it lay a stretch of unwashed
rock, as good a sea elephant ground as that on the long beach.

The girl standing beside Raft viewed the scene below her with a catch at
the heart. The carcases, the little blood-stained busy men, the try-pots
like witches' cauldrons and that strange-looking ship which even to her
eyes seemed not as other ships were, all these had a tinge of nightmare.
Amongst the men she noted one, big almost as Raft. He seemed their
leader.

"Chinks," said Raft, "Chinee--they've got their pigtails rolled up,
well, they're better than nothing."

He picked up the bundle that he had laid down and led the way to the
slope that gave on the beach.

As they came on to the upper part of the beach the "Chinks" noticed
them, paused for a second in their labours and then, finding that it
was only a solitary man and woman, went on with their work as though the
intruders had been a couple of penguins.

"Cool lot," said Raft.

The girl paused. The sight of the carcases and the blood at close
quarters, the absolute indifference of the blubber strippers at the
sight of an obvious pair of castaways, the whole scene and circumstance
turned her soul and chilled her heart.

"I don't like this," said she. "Those men make me afraid, they don't
seem human--they are _horrible_."

"Wait you here," said Raft.

He advanced alone across the