was being lowered.
Harlan's voice, shouting encouragement, gradually became fainter. At
last she felt her feet strike the flat of the ledge.

With a gasp of relief she straightened and turned to look about her.
She stood high on a narrow shelf thrust out from the sheer-rising
cliff. Before her face swarms of birds fanned the air, their wrangle
and jangle sounding almost in her ears. The wind stirred the acrid
smells about her. At her feet were several crude nests of sticks.
They contained eggs smaller than hen's eggs and of a pale greenish
color. They were the first she had seen for nine months and the sight
sent a thrill through her. With a little laugh at her own enthusiasm
she untied the bucket at her waist and carefully worked her way from
nest to nest as she gathered them.

Jean, not being one of those who find themselves affected by heights,
quickly became accustomed to her perilous shelf above the sea. After
tucking a large silk handkerchief about the eggs to insure their
safety, she sat down on the ledge to look about her. Every nook and
cranny in the surrounding rocks was alive with birds. Close to her,
long-necked shags on wide-spread wings balanced with dusky gracefulness
before sailing away through the myriad screaming gulls. Dignified
murres, their backs to the sea, sat soldier-like in the crevices like
plumb-bobs from their perches. Huge-beaked sea-parrots squatted with
comical solemnity or flapped quickly away toward the outer reaches of
the ocean where thousands of their kind floated on the water like a
black cloud. These were the love-days in bird-land--the mating time
for all feathered things. Sitting there, the girl felt a sudden
kindred friendliness for all these small creatures--a feeling of
at-one-ness and sympathy with their little lives and nest-making
ambitions.

As she became more at home on her ledge she began to look about her
with a view to exploring further. She lay flat on the rock and peered
down. Below her on the floor of the sea, now exposed by the falling
tide, she saw dozens of the strange, perfectly round boulders that had
become so familiar to all on Kon Klayu. They were of assorted sizes,
and where they lay thickest there was no seaweed or kelp. . . . After
some minutes she became aware that from one end of her ledge where it
joined the cliff, and running parallel to it, rough, out-jutting rocks
slanted downward in a crude, natural stairway, almost to the beach