CHAPTER XIII

We sailed steadily, fully rigged, towards the south. Now there were clouds of "draught-boards" and other sea-birds in attendance upon us. They followed us, wondering and confident, from morning until night, crying, throwing themselves about, flying in erratic curves--as if in welcome to us, another great bird with canvas wings, which was entering their distant and infinite domain, the Southern Pacific Ocean.

And their numbers increased daily in measure as we progressed. With the "draught-boards" there were pearl-grey petrels, the beak and claws lightly tinted with blue and pink; and black molly-mawks; and great, heavy albatrosses, dirty in colour, with their stupid sheepish air, with their immense rigid wings, cleaving the air, whining after us. There was one among them which the sailors pointed out to one another; an Admiral, a bird of a rare and enormous kind, with _three stars_ marked in black on its long wings.

The weather had changed and become calm, misty, mournful. The south trade wind had died away in its turn, and the clearness of the tropics was no more. A great damp cold surprised our senses. We were in August and the winter of the southern hemisphere was beginning. When we looked round the empty horizon, it seemed that the north, the side of the sun and of living countries, was still blue and clear; while the south, the side of the Pole and of the watery deserts, was dark and gloomy.

As a favour to me, Yves had obtained for his parrot a reserved compartment in the Commander's hen coop, and he used to go every evening to cover it with a piece of sailcloth in order to protect it from the night air.

Every day the sailors used to "fish" with their lines for "draught-boards" and petrels. There were rows of these birds, skinned like rabbits, hanging all red in the foreshrouds, waiting their turn to be eaten. After two or three days, when they had rendered all the oil in their bodies, they were ready for cooking.

These foreshrouds were the larder of the topmen. By the side of the "draught-boards" and the petrels, even rats might sometimes be seen, stripped also of their skin, and hung by the tail.

One night we heard suddenly the rising of a great fearsome voice, and everybody bestirred himself and took to running.

At the same time the _Sibylle_ leaned over, shuddering, as if in the grip of a tenebrous power.

Then even those who were not of the watch, even those who were sleeping on the spar deck, understood: it was the beginning of the great winds and the great swell; we had now entered the stormy latitudes of the south, amid which we should have to fight for our existence and at the same time make headway.

And the farther we advanced into this sullen ocean, the colder became the wind, and the more mountainous the swell.

The fall of the nights became sinister. We were in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn: desolation on the only land that was anywhere near, desolation on the sea, everywhere a desert. At this hour of the winter twilight, when one felt more particularly the need of a shelter, of getting near a fire, of covering under which to sleep--we had nothing, nothing--we kept vigil, for ever on the alert, lost amid all these moving things which made us dance in the darkness.

We tried hard to create an illusion of home in the little cabins rudely shaken, where swung the suspended lamps. But it was no use; there was no stability anywhere: we were in a little frail thing, lost, far from any land, in the midst of the immense desert of the southern waters. And, outside, we heard continuously the roar of the waves and the mournful moaning of the wind which smote the heart.

And Yves, for his part, had no more than his poor swinging hammock, in which, one night out of two, he was allowed the leisure to sleep a little warmly.