CHAPTER XX
VAE VICTIS
A Howling wind that rose at midnight carrying niagaras of rain overseafrom the mountains sank at dawn leaving a clear sky and a falling sea.
As she came out into the early morning light she could see boosts ofspray all along the rocks, but by the time she had tidied things up andfinished her breakfast these had vanished and the water was coming in,rolling lazily, and the sounds of the breakers came sleepy and evenlyspaced as though ruled by a metronome.
The bulls no longer lined the shore, though keeping close to the waterthey had broken up into groups, yet still the sense of disturbance wasthere pervading the beach like an atmosphere.
The tide was just turning back from the flood, and as she stood watchingshe noticed the curious fact that not a single bull was taking to thewater; ordinarily, here and there along the rocks, there was always somemonster taking a header, some vast bulk beaching in a potter of foam.This morning there was nothing of this sort.
Picking her way between the mothers and their babies she came down tothe sea edge, choosing a broad space left vacant because of the badlanding conditions. The rocks here were higher, forming a miniaturecliff some four or five feet in height and from this point lookingseaward something caught her eye.
Three black objects moving in a line were making a long ripple on theswell. They were the heads of three sea elephants moving like one. Thenthe line became the segment of a circle bending in shore. But theswimmers were not going to land; they kept parallel to the rocks and afew hundred yards out, and as they passed she could see clearly thegreat heads and sometimes the massive shoulders rising and washing awaythe water and the eyes, as the heads swung now and then shorewards,wicked eyes that seemed to blaze with the light of anger or battle.
She was not alone in observing them. They had been spotted by atrumpet-voiced sentry and instantly the whole place was in commotion.The air split with a roar that passed along from section to section ofthe beach whilst the cliffs resounded and a thousand sea-gulls rose asif from nowhere, crying, cat-calling and making a snowstorm in thesunlight.
On the roar and as if destroyed by it the three heads vanished.
Then, far out, they reappeared, only to dive again, leaving the seablank, but for a school of porpoises passing along on their quietbusiness a mile away towards the east.
The girl sat watching. There was something in all this of greater importthan the appearance of three swimming sea elephants. The beach told herthat. Not a bull in all that vast herd but was in motion, either helpingto crowd the females back towards the cliffs or patrolling the rocks.She could see them here and there rising up on their hind-quarters asthough to get a better view of the sea. They reminded her of dogsbegging for biscuits. Then, turning her eyes seaward again she saw ablack spot; it was a moving head. Then another broke the surface andanother, till in a moment, and for a mile-long stretch, hundreds ofheads appeared, all driving shorewards and then dipping and vanishingonly to reappear still closer in and closing on the beach with theswiftness of destroyers.
Then she knew, and, springing up, turned to run; but her retreat was cutoff towards the caves by the females herded up and, before she couldcollect her thoughts, the army of invasion was flinging itself from thewater, and the whole sea beach from end to end was filled with thethunder of battle.
For days the lone bulls had been cruising at sea waiting and watchingtill all the females were on shore under guard of their husbands. So ithappened every year as now, ending in a battle for the possession ofwives, a battle waged without quarter and with a fury whose soundreached the echoes of the hills.
Safe on the little rock plateau she watched the thunderous onslaught,frightened and then terrified and crying out.
The invaders drove in from the sea like the sweep of a curved sword.They struck the beach first a mile away and the battle ran towards herlike fire along tinder, boomed towards her ever loudening till it broketo right and left where the sea bulls flung themselves on the rocks andthe land bulls charged the on-comers like battering rams. Some werehurled back, only to return again, others held their ground. Then thereal business began whilst the ground trembled and the air shook and therocks poured blood.
Round her, and for a mile away, they fought like rams and they foughtlike dogs and they fought like tigers, and over the roaring siren soundsof the fight the gulls flew like the fume of it, screaming and swoopingand circling in spirals, and through everything like the continuousthud-thud of a propeller came the dunch of tons of flesh meeting tons offlesh head on, shoulder on, or side on.
She saw bulls ripped beyond belief, with shoulders slashed as if by thedown strokes of a sword, yet still fighting as though untouched, withrumps raised and tails up and teeth in the necks of their enemies, onehad his eye torn out, yet tremendous and victorious he was literallypunching his antagonist back into the sea.
The foam broke red and suddy; she saw that, just as she had seen thename of the _Albatross_ in the tremendous moment of the great ship'seclipse, and, just as the name, the red breaking foam seemed toconcentrate in itself the whole terror of the business.
Then, standing like a person helpless in a dream during the full hourthat the battle raged, she saw the females break bounds and spread overthe rocks carrying or pushing their young as if to get closer to thefight, and then she saw the battle beginning to break. Here and therebulls beaten and done for were taking to the sea and over all the beachthe fight had spread inwards towards the cliffs. The sea bulls werebeating the land bulls as a whole, interpenetrating them, getting closerto the females, herding the vanquished out.
And she saw, now, as though a curtain had been raised, that the wholegreat battle was between individuals.
The bulls fresh from the sea though attacking _en masse_ were under thedominion of no enmity in common, each had come to find a rival andhaving found him had no eyes for anything else. Nor having onceconquered did he pursue.
Another, and a wonderful thing, shewed up: the females had groupedthemselves as if to be taken, and now on the clearing beach could beseen family parties, some under the dominion of their new lords andmasters, some still being fought for.
So it hung, dwindling little by little till at last only two warriorswere left like the last-blazing point of the fight.
They were the biggest of the two herds; they looked as though they hadbeen rolled in gore and they seemed equally furious and equallyexhausted. All their rage was in their eyes. Too beaten to bite theycould only boost one against another like two schoolboys trying to pushone another off a form.
It seemed a miserable and tame ending of their tremendous struggle andshe recognized, or thought she recognized, that the biggest of them wasthe bull who had followed her that day like a dog towards the river.
This shouldering and pushing was his last effort to hold to his wife andfamily. In war it is the last step that counts, could he make it? Then astrange thing happened. The two monsters paused in their pushing,relaxed, and seemed for a moment to forget the existence of one another.That tremendous weariness lasted for a minute and then they woke up andthe biggest bull began to shuffle off to the sea.
His heart or his mind had failed him. The closer he got to the water'sedge the swifter he moved and the plunge of his body into the water wasthe last sound of that battle.
Not a corpse lay on the beach, nothing but the victorious lords andtheir ladies, and the lords seemed to pay as little attention to theirghastly wounds as they did to their old or newly got wives, who, nowthat peace was restored, were busy suckling their young.
A queer people, humorous and terrifying, making the girl feel that shehad placed her hand on something likeable, almost lovable, that had yet,of a sudden, nearly frightened her to death.
She sat recovering herself and helped by the regiment of penguins whomarched up to the seal beach and, knowing better than to attempt tocross it, stood bowing to the world in general and talking one to theother perhaps on the horrors of war.
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