it, with nothing on but the oilskin coat, the
blanket she used for a sack got hopelessly soaked and her head was
exposed to the rain owing to the fact that the sou'wester was in the
cave where the dead man lay, but she got used to it, especially as
neuralgia and colds are unknown in Kerguelen.

The loss of her only towel, the lump of cotton waste, was far worse than
the loss of the sou'wester and would have been worse still only that she
had other things to think about, especially on these journeys. They were
terrible and required all her fortitude to make them, and they were
terrible for a new reason. The birds had got at La Touche. Great
predatory birds like cormorants thronged the beach opposite the cave,
she could see them going in and out of the cave and she could hear them
quarrelling in there in the darkness.

Then, on her last journey, as she was preparing to come back, happening
to glance that way she saw a gull like a Burgomaster coming out of the
cave mouth and pulling after it something long like a rope upon which
the other gulls flung themselves. She turned and ran.

She had saved everything but one full bag of biscuits; she determined to
leave them. If worst came to the worst there was bread stuff in the
cache.

That night the memory of what she had seen haunted her sleep. It was as
though La Touche, unable to get at her in the material world was
determined to torment her in the imaginary.

She lay awake listening to the whale birds crying and the divers mewing
and quarrelling like cats, then, dropping asleep, she was awakened at
dawn by a new sound. Outside on the beach she heard a moaning like the
voice of someone in pain.

She raised herself on her elbow. It was a human voice without any manner
of doubt. It ceased, and springing to her feet she came out. But there
was no human being on the beach, nothing but the bulky forms of the
great sea bulls, and quite close to the cave a smaller form, a female
that had landed during the night and had just given birth to a baby, a
thing like a slug which she was fondling with her flippers.

Then in the strengthening light the girl could make out here and there
on the beach the forms of other females, and by noon that day there were
hundreds and hundreds, and on the next day the beach was one vast
nursery. It was the first great act in the life history of these sea
people towards which the girl's heart was going out more and more, and
as she sat that day wat