ast a river comes down
disembarging through three months; on the banks of this river is the
seal nursery where in summer the young sea elephants tumble and play and
take their swimming lessons, whilst the mothers lie on rocks and the
fathers fish and hunt and fight in battles, the roaring of which
resounds for miles. Here the penguins drill and hold councils and law
courts and marry and get divorced and hold political meetings, here the
rabbits play and the terns foregather, and here the winds that blow
from everywhere but the east, hunt and yell and pile in winter a twenty
foot sea that breaks in seven miles of thunder under seven miles of
spray thick as the smoke of battle.

Duck and teal haunt the place and gulls of nearly every known kind snow
it and flick it with movement. Yet above the thunder of the waves and
the cries of the birds and the shouting of the winds when they blow,
there hangs a silence--the silence of the remote and prehistoric. The
living world of men seems cut off from here by far away doors and
forever.

After supper they had explored the cave mouths in the cliff opposite to
where the boat had beached. There were three caves just here. One was
impracticable owing to water dripping from the roof, but the other two,
floored with hard sand, were good enough for shelter. The men had stowed
the provisions and themselves in the western mast giving the girl the
other and the boat sail for a pillow.

It was old Bompard who thought of the latter. La Touche seemed to have
no thought for any one or anything but himself. He grumbled all the time
during supper, grumbled at the fact that there was no stuff to make a
fire with, that they had nothing warm to drink, that some time soon
their tobacco must run out. It seemed to Cleo as she lay with her head
on the hard sailcloth and her body on the hard sand, covered with the
oilskin coat which she had taken off to use as a blanket, that through
the league long rumble of the surf she could hear him grumbling still.
She did not care. Hard though the floor was she did not mind, she was
chloroformed. Chloroformed by the air of Kerguelen. The air that fills
the lungs with life, keeps a man going all day with an energy and
buoyancy unknown elsewhere and then fells him with sleep.

She awoke when the whale birds had ceased crying, just after dawn, awoke
fresh and new and full of life. She felt none of that troubled surprise
which comes when the mind has to adjust itse