Thus would the mate's voice repeat the thought of the master, both
gazing ahead, while under their feet the ship rushes at some twelve
knots in the direction of the lee shore; and only a couple of miles
in front of her swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried naked with
an upward slant like a spear, a gray horizon closes the view with a
multitude of waves surging upwards violently as if to strike at the
stooping clouds.

Awful and threatening scowls darken the face of the West Wind in
his clouded, south-west mood; and from the King's throne-hall in
the western board stronger gusts reach you, like the fierce shouts
of raving fury to which only the gloomy grandeur of the scene
imparts a saving dignity. A shower pelts the deck and the sails of
the ship as if flung with a scream by an angry hand; and when the
night closes in, the night of a south-westerly gale, it seems more
hopeless than the shade of Hades. The south-westerly mood of the
great West Wind is a lightless mood, without sun, moon, or stars,
with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent flashes of the great
sheets of foam that, boiling up on each side of the ship, fling
bluish gleams upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as she runs,
chased by enormous seas, distracted in the tumult.

There are some bad nights in the kingdom of the West Wind for
homeward-bound ships making for the Channel; and the days of wrath
dawn upon them colourless and vague like the timid turning up of
invisible lights upon the scene of a tyrannical and passionate
outbreak, awful in the monotony of its method and the increasing
strength of its violence. It is the same wind, the same clouds,
the same wildly racing seas, the same thick horizon around the