`` Well ! '' said Kotick . `` You 're the only people I 've ever met uglier than Sea Vitch -- and with worse manners . '' Then he remembered in a flash what the Burgomaster gull had screamed to him when he was a little yearling at Walrus Islet , and he tumbled backward in the water , for he knew that he had found Sea Cow at last . The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing and chumping in the weed , and Kotick asked them questions in every language that he had picked up in his travels ; and the Sea People talk nearly as many languages as human beings . But the sea cows did not answer because Sea Cow can not talk . He has only six bones in his neck where he ought to have seven , and they say under the sea that that prevents him from speaking even to his companions . But , as you know , he has an extra joint in his foreflipper , and by waving it up and down and about he makes what answers to a sort of clumsy telegraphic code . By daylight Kotick 's mane was standing on end and his temper was gone where the dead crabs go . Then the Sea Cow began to travel northward very slowly , stopping to hold absurd bowing councils from time to time , and Kotick followed them , saying to himself , `` People who are such idiots as these are would have been killed long ago if they had n't found out some safe island . And what is good enough for the Sea Cow is good enough for the Sea Catch . All the same , I wish they 'd hurry . '' It was weary work for Kotick . The herd never went more than forty or fifty miles a day , and stopped to feed at night , and kept close to the shore all the time ; while Kotick swam round them , and over them , and under them , but he could not hurry them up one-half mile . As they went farther north they held a bowing council every few hours , and Kotick nearly bit off his mustache with impatience till he saw that they were following up a warm current of water , and then he respected them more . One night they sank through the shiny water -- sank like stones -- and for the first time since he had known them began to swim quickly . Kotick followed , and the pace astonished him , for he never dreamed that Sea Cow was anything of a swimmer . They headed for a cliff by the shore -- a cliff that ran down into deep water , and plunged into a dark hole at the foot of it , twenty fathoms under the sea . It was a long , long swim , and Kotick badly wanted fresh air before he was out of the dark tunnel they led him through . `` My wig ! ''
he said , when he rose , gasping and puffing , XXXXX open water at the farther end .
as at for in into since than through to with