ship. Only the wind is stronger, the clouds seem denser and more
overwhelming, the waves appear to have grown bigger and more
threatening during the night. The hours, whose minutes are marked
by the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with the screaming,
pelting squalls overtaking the ship as she runs on and on with
darkened canvas, with streaming spars and dripping ropes. The
down-pours thicken. Preceding each shower a mysterious gloom, like
the passage of a shadow above the firmament of gray clouds, filters
down upon the ship. Now and then the rain pours upon your head in
streams as if from spouts. It seems as if your ship were going to
be drowned before she sank, as if all atmosphere had turned to
water. You gasp, you splutter, you are blinded and deafened, you
are submerged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated, streaming all
over as if your limbs, too, had turned to water. And every nerve
on the alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of the Western
King, that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip
all the three masts out of your ship in the twinkling of an eye.



XXVII.



Heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls, sometimes by
a faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch waved
far away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the
crucial moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence
of the south-west gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting, clear-
eyed anger of the King's north-westerly mood. You behold another