TWILIGHT AND DAWN 129 
By fullest dark, from that lonely island a roar 
ascended to the sky—a roar like that of water 
chafing over stones, an unceasing comminglement 
of sound, hour after hour sustained, seething, 
simmering, bubbling, the strangest, uncanniest, 
most unbirdlike epithalamium. Difficult as these 
Petrel breeding-grounds may be of access, their 
attainment is worth the certainty of mal de mer, 
the risk of wreck. There to have been marooned 
is to have known a new experience. 
On my first evening after landing, a lovely star- 
light night, there must have been hundreds of 
thousands of birds in the sky. So great, in fact, 
were their numbers that it seemed impossible there 
could be available breeding room for all, even 
though many of the burrows contain side galleries. 
It may be that the Grey Petrel does not reach 
maturity until its second year, and that therefore 
not all the birds seen were mated birds. Above the 
heights of our own, and even more densely above 
the highlands of the neighbouring island, they 
wheeled and circled like swarming bees. As stars 
play in the rigging of a storm-tossed bark, so they 
moved to and fro across the pale clear sky, cross- 
ing and recrossing each other’s line of flight, 
wheeling and circling in endless gyrations and 
loops. We could never tire of watching them 
silently appear and as silently disappear, for, 
unlike bees filling the air with sound and unlike 
I 
