G. B. Lancaster

“ Each one was foul with guano, bleak, liver-colored, and hopelessly barren. The waves beat them angrily, and Harry heard them answering out of the slow silence:
“Life is solid and lasting as the wind spray. Death is immortal. We are Death. We are Desolation. We are Derision.”
The gray-brown seals slept on the flat brown-gray rocks. The penguins came singly in from the sea, and wore their part in the thousand-year track to the nearest rookery. The molly-hawks dipped and called through the spray far below. ”

“ The Old Man's stories had the salt of life and the sting of truth. Harry leaned on the rail, and listened, and burnt the old live passions again in his pipe-bowl, while the land passed away and the world was just a brimming teacup set in the universe.
“Yes,” he said presently, when the Old Man spoke of one they both had known. “I suppose that's what killed him, poor devil. But, of course, he wouldn't talk about it Getting cold, isn't it?”
Then he went below to clean out the first mate at poker. ”

“ Soon, very soon, the seals would go down into the sea, and the penguins would follow, and on all the Bounty Islands would be deep and speechless desolation, where a man might cry alone to the winds and the rain by day and week and month and year.
Harry rose lightly, springing back, and slipping the Colt into his pocket.
“Get up, man,” he said. “I'm not going to kill you.”
Then Tregarron took him about the feet, exactly as the thing is done in Eastern countries, and let loose a flood of fulsomeness to all ruling powers, including the quick death spat from the revolver barrel. ”

“ Once in many years a timber tramp or a whaler goes to pieces among the twenty odd islets, and then all the sea-birds of the Antarctic fatten and fight in the wreckage. But, taking the straight months as they run, it is only the bi-yearly Government steamer fetching a compass round all the southern groups that ever picks up the Bountys where they sit, naked and uncaring, in their naked sea. ”

“ After the first Harry bore it particularly badly, and then the men who had known him did not take his name in their mouths any more.
So much of the story is past and paid for. The rest belongs to one little hour of a sunny morning on the Bountys.
The Bounty Islands lie very nearly in latitude 48° south by longitude 179° west, and they are quite the bleakest land on God's earth. They are granite; brown, greasy granite, grooved through the centuries by generation and generation of passing seals and penguins. They are barren; they are accurst ”