These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on
us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again
for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity
of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the
snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the _Windhover_ canted away.
Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth and
transient hollow. Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck by
skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the
boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away,
and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened and
strengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life,
following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and
disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and
mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts
and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a
triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling
kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in
that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the
creative word had been spoken only five minutes before. We, and all
this, had just come. I wanted to laugh and cheer.


8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a
chart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing their
attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not
allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered
governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to