Half an hour after leaving the lifeboat station, Condy and Blix
reached the old, red-brick fort, deserted, abandoned, and rime-
incrusted, at the entrance of the Golden Gate. They turned its
angle, and there rolled the Pacific, a blue floor of shifting
water, stretching out there forever and forever over the curve of
the earth, over the shoulder of the world, with never a sail in
view and never a break from horizon to horizon.
They followed down the shore, sometimes upon the old and broken
flume that runs along the seaward face of the hills that rise from
the beach, or sometimes upon the beach itself, stepping from
bowlder to bowlder, or holding along at the edge of the water upon
reaches of white, hard sand.
The beach was solitary; not a soul was in sight. Close at hand,
to landward, great hills, bare and green, shut off the sky; and
here and there the land came tumbling down into the sea in great,
jagged, craggy rocks, knee-deep in swirling foam, and all black
with wet. The air was full of the prolonged thunder of the surf,
and at intervals sea-birds passed overhead with an occasional
piping cry. Wreckage was tumbled about here and there; and
innumerable cocoanut shards, huge, brown cups of fuzzy bark, lay
underfoot and in the crevices of the rocks. They found a jelly-
fish--a pulpy translucent mass; and once even caught a sight of a
seal in the hollow of a breaker, with sleek and shining head, his
barbels bristling, and heard his hoarse croaking bark as he hunted
the off-shore fish.
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