CHAPTER XXIX
THE SUMMIT
"I will break thee." Across Kerguelen those words are written to be readby the soul of man. The rock, the rain, the wind and the sea, these, asinstruments, would surely be sufficient for the carrying out of thethreat; but the soul of man is strong, hence the spirit of Kerguelen hascalled to its assistance Fog.
Since landing on the great beach the girl had seen the islandsfog-wreathed several times but the beach itself had only once beenattacked.
When she awoke on the rock plateau the first word of Raft to her was"fog."
They had slept as the dead sleep for nine hours and Raft had awoken withthe girl's head still on his chest and feeling as though he were packedin damp cotton wool. It was after sun up and the fog was so dense thatthe edge of the plateau was only just visible. Through the fog came thebreaking of the waves; the tide was coming in again.
Raft had lit his pipe and the girl, stiff from lying, rose up andstamped about to warm herself. Neither of them spoke a word in the wayof grumbling.
The plateau was about twenty yards in length and by drawing off fiveyards or so one could have a dressing-room screened with a fog veil, sothe fog was not an unmixed evil.
Then they breakfasted, listening to the slashing of the water just belowand counting the time till the out-going sea would let them loose.
"It's a good job I went to the point last night," said Raft, "else wewouldn't be able to start in this smother, not knowing what was beyondthere."
"Will we be able to start in this?" she asked.
"Lord, yes," replied he, "the cliffs will give us a lead, it'll be slowgoing but we'll do it all right, it's not more than six miles or so tothe break from the point there."
"When can we start?"
Raft listened to the water below, it was breaking now against the nearrocks but not yet against the cliff base.
"In another three hours or maybe a bit more," said he.
An hour later, as though the Fog spirit had been listening and watching,and as though it despaired of its attack on the heart of the prisoners,the smother began to thin; by the time the tide reluctantly began tofree them it had broken up and patches of the blessed blue sky shewedoverhead.
By the time they reached the point and had a view of the great cliffbreak-down that would give them release it was fine weather, with agently heaving sea breaking in beneath a sky of summer.
It was as though their troubles were ended. At noon they reached thegreat break-down and a new form of country.
Stretching inland almost to the foothills lay a broad valley, boulderstrewn, and looking like the bed of some vanished river. Before them tothe west the ground rose from the valley, gently, unbroken, desolate,like nothing so much as the desolate country that borders the Riff coastof Morocco. But it was ease itself compared to the tumble of rocksaround and beyond the Lizard Point.
Down the middle of the valley came a little wimpling rivulet like theremains of the river that had once been. They drank from it and restedand had some food, then they started with light hearts, taking the easyascent to the high ground, treading a moss dark and springy like themoss that covers the old lava beds of Iceland.
"Look!" said the girl.
They had reached the highest point and before them, away to the west,stretched the same rolling dark-smooth country, making low cliffs at thesea edge and then, as if weary of little things, springing gigantic andbold towards the sky.
"It's over there the bay would be," said Raft. "Ponting said it was ablack brute of a bay between two cliffs rising higher than a ship's topmasts. Well, there's our chance before us--if you call it a chance. It'sa long way, taking it how you will."
Chance! Despite her optimism and belief in being led, as she stood nowwith the wind blowing in her face it seemed to her that she stoodbefore absolute hopelessness.
Nothing, not even the sea corridor, had balked her like that terribledistance, calm, sunlit, yet gloomy like a recumbent giant.
The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden;travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding aship--a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found.
And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Herethere was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The shipwould have to be there, waiting for them.
Raft must have been mad! mad! mad! She herself must have been mad todream of such a thing.
Her lips felt dry as pumice stone and she glanced at her companion as hestood with the bundle at his feet and the harpoon in his hand, lookingabout him, far and near, as unconcerned as though beyond that great humpon the skyline lay a sure town with a railway station.
No, Raft was not mad. He was unconcerned. He knew, even better than she,the hopelessness of their position, yet he was calm and unmoved, neverfrom the first moment she had seen him had he been otherwise; beforeeverything, like a rock, he continued.
Yet it was only now, as he quietly stood there surveying their "chance,"that he came home to her truly as he was, unbreakable; simple, vast,forged by the sea. She swallowed down the devil of doubt and despair asshe stood looking at him standing so, and she was about to speak when,catching sight of something along the high ground to the right hepointed it out to her. She saw a white point on the ground a couple ofhundred yards away.
As they drew close to it it enlarged and other things shewed. It was thetop of a skull belonging to a skeleton tucked away in a little hollow asthough it were sheltering from the wind.
Rags of clothing still hung to it and the boots were there still thathad once belonged to it.
"Wonder what did that poor chap in?" said Raft as he stood looking atit. "Wrecked, most likely and lost himself--well, it's a sign folk havebeen here, anyhow."
He gauged the measure of the desolation around by his words. Here askeleton did not make the desolation more desolate; on the contrary, itproved that folk had been here.
So the girl felt.
"He'd have been blown away by this only for that hollow he's in," saidRaft, "well, he's out of his troubles whoever he was and whatever shiphe hailed from."
"We can't bury him," said she.
"He's buried," said Raft.
He had summed up Kerguelen in two words and there was almost a trace ofbitterness in his voice. Beyond the remark that it was a brute of acoast he had never grumbled against the place or abused it or theAlmighty for making it, as many a man has done; and now at the summit ofthings two words sufficed him.
Then, leaving the skeleton to the wind and the sky and the countlessages, they turned and went on their way west.