"Better keep the floats," suggested the mate. "Mebbe it's only the side of a bank we're on." They waded on, breast-deep, and presently were out of their depth again. But the feel of something below them, and the certainty that it was still not very far away, were cheering. In a few minutes they were walking again, having evidently crossed a channel between two banks. And so, alternately walking and swimming, they drew at last towards the jungle of wreckage; and all the time, from somewhere beyond it, rose those piercing, wailing screams which Macro in his heart was certain came from the spirits of the dead. Here the water was no more than up to their knees and shoaling still, and they came now upon more than the bones of ships,--chaotic masses of masts and spars and rigging piled high and wide in fantastic confusion, and in among them, tangled beyond even the power of the seas to chase them further, barrels and boxes and crates, some still whole, mostly broken; rotting bales, and pitiful and ridiculous fragments of their contents worked in among them as if by impish hands. "Gosh, what wastry!" said Macro at the sight. "There's many a thousand pounds of goods piled here,--ay, hunderds of thousands, webbe." "I'd give it all for a crust of bread," said Wulfrey hungrily. "An' mebbe there's that too. If any o' them casks has flour in 'em we needn' starve. It cakes round the sides wi' the wet, but the core's all right." Then, beyond the gigantic barrier of wastry, rose again that shrill screaming and shrieking, louder than ever, and Macro said "Gosh!" and looked like bolting back into the sea. Wulfrey, determined to fathom it, hauled himself painfully up a tangle of ropes and clambered to the top of the pile and saw, about a mile away, a narrow yellow spit of sand, and all about it a dense cloud of sea-birds, myriads of them, circling, diving, swooping, quarrelling. One moment the vast gray cloud of them drooped to the sea and seemed to settle there, the next it was whirling aloft like a writhing water-spout, every component drop of which was a venomous bundle of feathers shrieking and screaming its hardest in the bitter fight for food. And the harsh and raucous clamour of them, each intent on its own, had in it something fiendishly inhuman and chilling to the blood. "It's only sea-birds, man," he cried to Macro. "Come up and see for yourself," and the mate, with new life at the word, hauled himself up alongside and stood staring. "My Gosh! ... I never saw the like o' that before," he said at last. "There's millions of 'em. They're fighting ... over our shipmates mebbe.... We needn' starve if we can get at 'em," a sentiment which somehow, in all the circumstances of the case, did not greatly appeal to Wulfrey, hungry as he was. "If they all set on a man he wouldn't have much chance," he said, with a shiver. "They could pick him clean before he knew where he was."