Laurence had grown used to the tremendous speed at which dragons consumed the miles: fifteen in an hour at a steady enduring pace, and as many as two hundred in a day, with no obstacles to be surmounted or roads to clear and no dependence upon the wind; but their passage through the jungle was more akin to the slow creep of a ship through the doldrums, being towed by her boats: Iskierka could not fly for long. She leaned heavily on Kulingile and Temeraire, who took it in turn to brace her up, but even they could not support her massive weight very well or for any real length of time. Granby drooped upon her back; she drooped in mid-air, and often came down to rest in the body of the river and moved along like some vast steaming river snake, paddling herself along.
The heat was tremendous, and the air of the jungle close and thick around them when they flew low, or crept after Iskierka in the river. Hammond urged speed, and looked piteous for it: he mopped his brow with shaking hands nearly every minute, and slept fitful and feverish; the other men had by now most of them recovered, but Hammond had never given the impression of particular resilience, and their journey had strained stronger men to the limits. But there was no speed to be had: all energy, it seemed, had been wrung out of them.
Mrs. Pemberton, in her long black dress, was an improbable and lone figure of civilization amid their increasingly ragged number: she managed by dint of quiet but firm requests of a few well-chosen men—those not so tired as to refuse to move but disinclined to argument or quarrel—to every evening arrange a small separate campsite and fire for herself and Roland, and even hot wash-water.
They dragged themselves slowly through the jungle, until Laurence dreamed one night of gulls crying, and woke to hear their voices: when Temeraire went aloft there was a cloud of them wheeling and circling in the distance over the great mouth of the river where it met the open endless ocean blue: they had come to the shore of the Atlantic.
Iskierka lay down in a tidal pool and shut her eyes; Granby was lifted down from her back and carried into the shade of palm-trees. Temeraire and Kulingile went out into the ocean, and did not come back for a full day and night; Laurence had begun to fear in earnest when looking out over the waves, under his shading hand, he saw the strange apparition approaching: a vast misshapen creature with four wings and no limbs.
“Clear the shore, there,” he called, when they came closer; and in exhaustion the two dragons set down their prize: a true monster of the deep, a blue whale not perhaps fully grown, but even so nearly larger than them both together.
“ ’Twould bring twenty thousand pounds rendered down, I expect,” one of the sailors, an old whaler, said in hushed tones, as they sank a sharpened spear into the blubber and cut away to find it nearly a foot deep. Every man had a slice, and Iskierka ate a good two tons of the stuff; Temeraire and Kulingile had already eaten.
“I killed it with my roaring, when it came up for breath, and then we took it in turns to keep the whole above water while the other ate,” Temeraire said, drowsily, while Laurence stroked his muzzle, “for we thought that should make it easier to carry back: but I do not mind admitting to you, Laurence, that I rather worried it was too large even so. Oh! I am very tired.”
In the morning, Iskierka finished another meal of whale meat and blubber, and roused enough from her torpor to say peevishly, “Where is Granby? Why is he not with me?” and then she saw him.
“If none of you are going, I am,” she said fiercely, when she had overcome her first confusion, after Granby did not answer her: his eyes were heavy-lidded and far-away, lost in fever and in pain. “He must have a surgeon: he shall have a surgeon; you will put him on my back at once.”
There were seven other men burning with fevers and the mortification of small wounds, mere scratches acquired in passing which had at first gone unnoticed, until they had gone quickly to rot; two had already been buried. Laurence had not yet decided to press forward, undecided as to the greater evil: he had seen enough men die, at the surgeons’ hands, not to easily take on the risk of moving Granby only to deliver him into those hands, even if any skilled man might be found near-by.