Helen's eyes were full of pain. I raised the ice-axe. As I did so, the albatross swung his neck round in the exquisitely beautiful motion which is the act of courtship of the great wanderer of the seas, a grace worthy of a Fonteyn. I lowered the ice-axe and looked at Helen. She went forward and examined the half-extended wing.
I went closer. I expected a savage slash from the strong beak. It did not come, but instead the albatross stood swaying his head.
" I'll come back with Sailhardy," I said. "We'll bring some ropes and get the bird down to the hut. At the beach tomorrow we can catch some fish for him-there are bound to be some left behind in the rock-pools when the tide recedes. We mustn't wait here much longer."
We hurried to the roverhullet as quickly as our crampons and the ice-slope would allow. Sailhardy was delighted at the thought of saving the albatross; rather than ropes he brought a fishing-net which had been thawing in front of the hut on the rocks. Walter, with the gun, did not hinder us.
At the ice-cliff, Sailhardy and I found the great bird still crouching. It was a matter of minutes to put the net round it. Together we carried it back and set it free in front of the hut as sunset closed on our second night on Bouvet.
At first light next morning Upton began preparations for lowering the aluminium sheets to the beach. Sailhardy, Helen, Walter and I set off down the cliff-side track, the Norwegian bringing up the rear with the automatic. Even at the ladder, down which I helped Helen hand over hand, there was no chance to jump Walter. The descent was easy this time with ropes secured to the upper rungs; Walter came down them with the agility of a cat. For the last section of the descent, I roped Helen to myself in front and to Sailhardy behind. About three hundred feet above the beach Sailhardy stopped and called " Look! The catchers are launching a boat!"
Helen stood hard back against the rock face, away from the fearful drop.
I trained my glasses on the ships. " The crazy idiots!
What are they trying to do?"
Walter tapped the Schmeisser. " Coming to get us. I don't see Lars Brunvoll just sitting waiting."
Sailhardy pointed at the seas breaking heavily on the rocks and the beach. " No one could land from an ordinary ship's boat in that."
" The sea is the same for sailing to-morrow," I said grimly. " We have a Tristan whaleboat," replied Sailhardy.
" My God!" exclaimed Helen, watching the white-capped rollers race across the anchorage.
The islander looked with a curious mixture of satisfaction and awe. " It will be easier when we get into the open sea, ma'am. True, the boat will pitch a lot, but she's small enough not to stretch from wave to wave. That helps quite a bit." I focused the glasses on Chimay, Brunvoll's catcher. " Boat away!"
The tiny thing pulled hard from the ship's side with two 179 men at the oars on either side. The man at the tiller could have been Brunvoll, but I was not sure. The boat rode clear of the catcher's lee and disappeared in a welter of spray. I saw it capsize and the five men were flung into the water. " She's over!"
" They'd better haul them out of the water-quickly!" exclaimed Sailhardy. " They won't last long in this cold." The catcher steamed in what seemed slow motion to the struggling men and I saw some being hauled aboard.
" Good riddance!" said Walter. " Come on, we've got work to do. Let's get down to the beach."
We scrambled down the final section to the rough shingle. The whaleboat lay where we had left her. We unroped ourselves. I looked up. From the top of the cliff the first piece of aluminium decking was starting to swing down at the end of a long rope.
Helen, Sailhardy and I started for the boat. As our boots crunched on the shingle, a tiny head rose over the side of the whaleboat. The soft, luminous eyes of the creature, no bigger than a full-grown dachshund, stared at us.
" It's a Ross seal!" whispered Sailhardy.
Neither he nor I had ever seen this rarest and most beautiful of Antarctic animals. Helen started forward. " Don't ma'am…" began Sailhardy, but she was already at the tiny creature. It went unhesitatingly into her arms. His mink-grey fur was slightly darker underneath than above.
She turned to me, her eyes shining. " Bruce! Look at him! See how he trusts me!"
I laughed and stroked the lovely head of the seal pup. " That is just the trouble with the Ross seal. They trust everyone. The old sealers exterminated them by simply hitting them over the head. They trust humans completely." Helen put the little creature on the beach. He walked from her to me and then to Sailhardy. He did not, like the common Southern fur seal, turn his flippers forward when he walked, and I was surprised that he did not slip on the wet rocks since the undersides of his flippers were covered in softest down. I had never before seen a seal's flippers with fur on them. He allowed us to stroke his head, but Helen was clearly his favourite. She picked him up again and he nestled in the crook of her arm.
" I have never seen anything so lovely," she smiled. " I'm going to take him with us in the boat. We'll take fish along for him too."
It was the remembrance of Helen with the exquisite creature in her arms, half enveloped in her sea-leopard coat, with the backdrop of the basalt cliffs and little beach, that was to return to my mind's eye again and again in the days to come.
" Bring him along, for sure," said Walter sullenly. " He'll make good eating when the going gets tough."
" Walter!" I said quietly. " If you touch this pup, I'll kill you with my bare hands."
He raised the Schmeisser at my tone. " Keep back!" he said surlily. " You'll find you're killing the bloody thing yourself when your belly cries out for fresh meat."
A sheet of aluminium clattered on its rope over our heads. Sailhardy and I seized it as it swung in the wind against the cliffs. We found that we would probably need only four sheets to half-deck the boat both fore and after. With rope and tools we had brought down from the roverhullet, we bent, shaped, tied and fastened the aluminium to the canvas and wooden ribs. We worked all day, pausing only to unship the cases of stores which Upton and Pirow lowered to stock the boat. By the middle of the afternoon the boat was ready halfdecked, but Sailhardy was not satisfied. I wanted to get away from the raw little beach to the roverhullet before the weather became worse. The sun was obscured and great clouds drifted round the twin peaks. From time to time squalls masked the tap of the cliff. Helen helped stack the cases of supplies out of reach of the sea in the natural corner of the cliff where Horntvedt's flagstaff was. The seal pup followed her everywhere.
Although I wished to get away, Sailhardy took a long look at the ominous weather build-up in the south-west and started in on the steering lines and the rudder. For fully an hour he flexed the supple lines through the holes, greasing and regreasing them, checking, testing again and again. He went repeatedly over the odd projection on the port side near the rudder, from which a rope ran through the sternport into a big enclosed space below the helmsman's seat. Nothing would make him hurry over his searching examination.
While he checked and Walter stamped in the growing cold, Helen and I fished in the rock-pools with the seal pup, which joined in hauling up the codlike Notothenia fish as if it had been a game. By the time Sailhardy had finished, we had collected a pile of about twenty, which we stacked with the other supplies. Upton had agreed the previous night to taking the albatross in the boat because of Sailhardy's insistence that the great bird would be invaluable in finding land once it could fly again-the islander reckoned it would be within a week-and so, he said, help us locate Thompson Island. Sailhardy had reinforced his argument by pointing out that in a small boat in bad weather it would be virtually impossible to take an accurate sighting. I suspected, however, that Sailhardy was more concerned with the albatross' safety than with locating Thompson Island. We had decided, too, that we could lower the bird down the cliff-side by the rope by putting the net round it again. I was well aware of Sailhardy's methods of navigation-by the direction of a flock of petrels flying, by feeling the temperature of the sea at hourly intervals with his hand, the colour of the water, and a host of other esoteric sealore. His only manmade instrument was a kind of rough wooden backstaff by which he took angles on the stars, but never the sun. His landfalls were as good as mine.