and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts--all
naturally confusing to a landsman such as myself. But it was the
heartlessness of it that especially struck me. The dead man was an
episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas
covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her
work went on. Nobody had been affected. The hunters were laughing
at a fresh story of Smoke's; the men pulling and hauling, and two
of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky
to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly,
and sinking down, down--

Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a
beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and
slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and
gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-
banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast. Rain-
squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog.
And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by
wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the
south-west, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.



CHAPTER IV



What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as I strove
to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and