As for myself, I despaired utterly. More than ever I realized what I had done in bringing those who had trusted me into so dire a plight. And for what? To prove a theory that was worth nothing to them or to me, after all was told. To seek out a practically inaccessible land, and what now seemed to me a paltry, indolent race that added nothing to the world’s store of wealth or progress—to pay for it with our lives. I had promised a new world, perhaps wealth beyond our wildest dreams. I had found, instead, a land of dreams only, and of shadows. I had brought us all, at last, face to face with privation, suffering—death. Even should we eventually reach home, it seemed to me that I, still a penniless adventurer, could not presume to claim the hand of Edith Gale. Truly I was in the depths. Whether we kept with the current, or what part it played in our struggles, we could not tell, but we reached at last the easier seas below Cape Horn, and here we were met by what seemed to us the King of All Storms, determined at last to destroy us for having penetrated the depths of his domain. We were off the South Shetlands again, somewhere near the spot where, twenty years before, my uncle’s vessel had been last seen battling with a mighty tempest, and was supposed to have gone down. I reflected vaguely that it must have been another just such as this, and that it was a curious fate that had brought me with those I loved to find a grave in the same unfriendly waters. There were nights, now, and the black sea and sky made this one a memory that divides as with a sable curtain all that went before it from all that followed after. Once there came a heavy jar as our keel struck and grated over some hidden reef. We had no means of knowing where we were, and even had we known, the knowledge would have availed us little in these uncharted seas. Suddenly, in the electric glow of our searchlight, there rose straight before us a black wall that was not the penetrable night. A great wave just then lifted us and bore us forward. An instant later there came a jar that threw us from our feet, and then the stanch old Billowcrest no longer tossed and pitched and battled, but lay rocking helplessly, as though wounded to the life. There came first a quick order to lower the boats. Then another to hold them in readiness, but not to launch until the vessel gave signs of breaking up. It was better to remain where we were, as long as we could—to wait for daylight, if possible. Examined below, the Billowcrest showed as yet no opening, and seemed to be lying easily. Morning dawned at last on a gray, desolate shore, with a sea as gray and desolate, between. But the King of Storms, satisfied, perhaps, that he had stranded us on a desert island, had gone his way. Chauncey Gale came on deck presently with Edith, still pale and ill, but more animated than she had been for days. With Captain Biffer I had come out early to view the shore.