(It was, like Jeannette, a soft and effeminate name for such a hard trophy, but then again, these men had not been in the company of women for twenty-three months.) They couldn’t stop looking at the island. Henrietta was, said De Long, “the cynosure of all eyes … as pleasing as an oasis in the desert.” It became their talisman, their fetish. “We gaze at it,” De Long said, “we criticize it, we guess at its distance, we wish for a favoring gale to drive us towards it, and no doubt we would accept an assertion that it contained a gold mine which would make us all as rich as the treasury without
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