"Volcanic?" he said.

"'Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord,'" muttered the
surgeon in his deep bass, as he looked forth upon the streaming, radiant
heavens. "It's like nothing else."

In the west the splendour and the terror shot to the zenith. Barnett
whirled the wheel. The ship responded perfectly.

"I though she might be bewitched, too," he murmured.

"You may heal her for the light, Mr. Barnett," said Captain Parkinson
calmly. He had come from his cabin, all his nervous depression gone in
the face of an imminent and visible danger.

Slowly the great mass of steel swung to the unknown. For an hour the
unknown guided her. Then fell blackness, sudden, complete. After that
radiance the dazzled eye could make out no stars, but the look-out's
keen vision discerned something else.

"Ship afire," he shouted hoarsely.

"Where away?"

"Two points to leeward, near where the light was, sir."

They turned their eyes to the direction indicated, and beheld a majestic
rolling volume of purple light. Suddenly a fiercer red shot it through.

"That's no ship afire," said Trendon. "Volcano in eruption."