go the lives of all the sailors and passes the soul of the ship. And
in the ultimate cry of ships are the songs the sailors sing, and
their hopes and all their loves, and the song of the wind among the
masts and timbers when they stood in the forest long ago, and the
whisper of the rain that made them grow, and the soul of the tall
pine-tree or the oak. All this a ship gives up in one cry which she
makes at the last. And at that moment I would pity the tall ship if
I might; but a man may feel pity who sits in comfort by his fireside
telling tales in the winter--no pity are they permitted ever to
feel who do the work of the gods; and so when I have brought her
circling from round my shoulders to my waist and thence, with her
masts all sloping inwards, to my knees, and lower still and
downwards till her topmast pennants flutter against my ankles, then
I, Nooz Wana, Whelmer of Ships, lift up my feet and trample her
beams asunder, and there go up again to the surface of the Straits
only a few broken timbers and the memories of the sailors and of
their early loves to drift for ever down the empty seas.

'Once in every hundred years, for one day only, I go to rest myself
along the shore and to sun my limbs on the sand, that the tall ships
may go through the unguarded Straits and find the Happy Isles. And
the Happy Isles stand midmost among the smiles of the sunny Further
Seas, and there the sailors may come upon content and long for
nothing; or if they long for aught, they shall possess it.

'There comes not Time with his devouring hours; nor any of the evils
of the gods or men. These are the islands whereto the souls of the
sailors every night put in from all the world to rest from going up
and down the seas, to behold again the vision of far-off intimate
hills that lift their orchards high above the fields facing the