It is not good to be alone. As the weeks passed she began to lose andforget the feeling of surety in rescue and at times, now, she foundherself talking out loud, putting what was in her mind into speech asthough a companion were by, and sometimes she would hear a voicehallooing to her and start and cast her eyes over the desolate beachonly to see the gulls.
The beach was always haunted by queer noises; the chanting sound of thewaves coming in, a faint sound like the beating of a drum at very lowtide, to say nothing of the booming of bitterns and the barking of brentgeese and the hundred voices of the wind. She would listen and listen,her mind wandering aimlessly, and in the great rains, when the whole seawas shut out by the downpour, the noise would lull her like opium.
The baby sea elephants lost their long black coats and put on theirsuits of fine yellow fur and took themselves to the nursery by theriver, where all day long they played and tumbled and swam, and then shewould sit and watch them like a mother watching her children.
The great battle of the bulls seemed like something far away beyondwhich other things were becoming vague. Something that was not meant tobe seen so close by human eyes, something that had pushed her stillfurther from man.
It was full summer now, the season of tremendous sunsets and when thesky was clear, vast conflagrations lit themselves beyond the LizardPoint painting the islands and purpling the skies, and one evening asshe sat in the western blaze watching the moving beach and listening tothe playing and quarrelling of the nursery a voice said to her:
"Some day all these will take to the sea and leave you. There will benothing here but the rocks and the sea."
It was as though the sunset had spoken.
The thought aroused her as a knock on the door arouses a sleeper.Fighting against it her mind became more fully awake. She said toherself: "If they go I will go too."
For a long time now she had lived without hot food or drink. On cominghere first she had cut some wood from the figure-head to make a fire,but it was damp, just damp enough to prevent it from kindling, so shehad let things go as women do in the matter of food when they have notany one else to feed; she had burrowed into the cache and got at some ofthe tins of vegetables and on these and biscuits and tinned meat shemade out, eating less and less as time went on.
It is bad to be alone, even with sea elephants to ward off fears, evenwith provisions enough for a year and a cave to shelter one.
She had never given in. She had fought the future and refused to befrightened by it, she had worked for life and taken refuge in themoment, and now the moment was taking its revenge for being too muchlived in.
To eat was almost too much trouble and presently the seal nursery becametoo long a walk and the little sea elephants at play had lost theirpower to interest her. Sleep began to take the place of food andsometimes, and for no reason, she would weep like a child.
The food she ate sometimes seemed to poison her, bringing on vomitingand dysentery, and it poisoned her because her stomach failed to digestit.
She was being poisoned, poisoned by loneliness. Had her stomach notfailed her mind would have given, as it was the weakness of malnutritionsaved her reason as it slowly destroyed her hold on life.
Her dreams became sometimes more vivid than reality and they always heldher to the beach where she watched without terror battles betweenmonstrous sea elephants and processions of penguins infinite in length,penguins that passed her bowing, bowing, bowing till she woke in thedark with the palms of her hands dry and burning and her lips likepumice stone and her tongue feeling hard like the tongue of a parrot,but the worst experience of all was a shock that came nearly every timeshe lay down at night and just before sleep took her.
It seemed like the blow of a fist, a fist that hit her everywhere,making her start and draw up her legs and cry out.
All this, perhaps, was what she had foreseen when long ago she hadwatched a great ship that had told her of Desolation--and somethingworse.
This was what no one had ever imagined in connection with Desolation.Its power to kill with its own hand. To gently destroy, sucking thevitality like a vampire and fanning the victim to dullness with itswings.
The sea elephants might have noticed that the female creature to whomthey had grown so accustomed appeared little now, a shrinking visionthat every day shortened its wanderings; that it walked differently,that it seemed more bent. But the sea elephants knew nothing ofLoneliness or its works, nor did they notice, one morning, that thoughthe sun was shining the figure did not appear at all.