utside.
Very soon after breakfast she went out. Kalliope, faithful even amid
the torment of the sirocco, followed her. They struggled together
towards their watch place on the cliff. The wind buffeted them, set
their hair floating wildly, struck their eyelids painfully. Their legs
were caught and held by tangling petticoats. Sometimes as the path
twisted they headed right against the storm. Then bent almost double,
they bored their way through dense resisting air. Sometimes, moving
slantwise, they were caught by a side blast, and then they walked
leaning at a sharp angle against the wind. Or, for a little while,
they scudded before it, driven against their wills to swift motion
which was unbearably exhausting. More than once Kalliope flung
herself down and lay flat, panting on the shelterless grass. If she
had taken her own way she would have given the struggle up. But the
Queen, though she too gasped for breath, would not turn back or rest
for more than a few minutes. She was determined to reach the look-out
post on the cliff. In the end she got there.

Kalliope lay at full length, face downwards, in the little hollow. The
Queen sat beside her and looked out to sea. Her hair was blown
backwards. Her blouse, its fastenings torn, was blown open at her
neck. Her face was flecked with tiny crystals of salt. She breathed in
quick short pants. She kept her eyelids open with an effort against
the blast.

The welter of grey water, broken everywhere with splashes of lighter
grey foam, merged into the misty grey of the low enveloping clouds.
The half circle of the horizon seemed very near. She watched the waves
rise, rush forward, curl their crests over and break in foam. In one
place the foam was whiter, thicker than elsewhere. The waves broke
more frequently there. It was as if a patch of very fiercely breaking
water moved towards the island. Behind it, before it, and on either
side of it the waves tossed and broke. On this one patch they broke
more constantly and more wildly. In a little while the Queen got
glimpses of a dark mass which rose from the middle of this breaking
water. Then she saw, clear above the foam, a short thick mast. She
guessed that in the middle of the breaking water, half submerged,
washed constantly from stem to stern, there was a boat which made for
the shore.

The Queen watched, fascinated. The boat held her course for the
island. She reached the corner of the reef outside the bay. She swung
roun