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The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad
page 68 of 212 (32%)

It was the wintry, murky time of cold gales and heavy seas. With
the snapping of her tail-shaft her life seemed suddenly to depart
from her big body, and from a stubborn, arrogant existence she
passed all at once into the passive state of a drifting log. A
ship sick with her own weakness has not the pathos of a ship
vanquished in a battle with the elements, wherein consists the
inner drama of her life. No seaman can look without compassion
upon a disabled ship, but to look at a sailing-vessel with her
lofty spars gone is to look upon a defeated but indomitable
warrior. There is defiance in the remaining stumps of her masts,
raised up like maimed limbs against the menacing scowl of a stormy
sky; there is high courage in the upward sweep of her lines towards
the bow; and as soon as, on a hastily-rigged spar, a strip of
canvas is shown to the wind to keep her head to sea, she faces the
waves again with an unsubdued courage.



XIX.



The efficiency of a steamship consists not so much in her courage
as in the power she carries within herself. It beats and throbs
like a pulsating heart within her iron ribs, and when it stops, the
steamer, whose life is not so much a contest as the disdainful
ignoring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the waves. The sailing-
ship, with her unthrobbing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a sort
of unearthly existence, bordering upon the magic of the invisible
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