Yet Sea Catch never chased a beaten seal, for that was against the Rules of the
Beach. He only wanted room by the sea for his nursery.
Montgomery steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the
beach. Then the man on the
beach hastened towards us.
My hands were tied behind my back; and, clutching a shell in them, I rolled over and over, up the
beach, till I came to the rocks I knew to be there.
There was no way of penetrating the island from our cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the
beach, and, on either side of the cove, rose from the deep water.
`The machine was standing on a sloping
beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky.
I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and though he weighed as much as a Shetland pony, I managed to drag him to shore and well up upon the
beach. Here I found that one of his forelegs was broken--the crash against the cliff-face must have done it.
As it was I must have walked for a great distance since I ate four times and slept twice before I reached the sea, but at last I did so, and my pleasure at the sight of it was greatly enhanced by the chance discovery of a hidden canoe among the bushes through which I had stumbled just prior to coming upon the
beach.
At last she was able to take her eyes from the surf and gaze at the sea-horizon of deepest peacock-blue and piled with cloud-masses, at the curve of the
beach south to the jagged point of rocks, and at the rugged blue mountains seen across soft low hills, landward, up Carmel Valley.
All this made him more and more anxious to learn what was going on at the
beach; but it was in vain that he now tried to push forward; the natives held him back.
He saw the two whale-boats land on the
beach, and the sick, on stretchers or pick-a-back, groaning and wailing, go by in lugubrious procession.
Late the following morning the lookout announced that he could discern surf about a mile ahead; and as we approached, we all saw the line of breakers broken by a long sweep of rolling surf upon a narrow
beach. The launch was lowered, and five of us made a landing, getting a good ducking in the ice-cold waters in the doing of it; but we were rewarded by the finding of the clean-picked bones of what might have been the skeleton of a high order of ape or a very low order of man, lying close to the base of the cliff.
On the
beach, that night at Tulagi, vainly wondering what had become of the whaleboat, Michael had met the squat, thick, hair- grizzled ship's steward.