the yard, and down the street, with pelting feet, and open arms, and
sobbing bosom, for I thought that all Aadheim was after me; nor was my
horrid haste appeased till I was on board the _Boreal_, and moving down
the fjord.

Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visited
Bergen, and put in at Stavanger. And I saw that Bergen and Stavanger
were dead.

It was then, on the 19th August, that I turned my bow toward my native
land.

* * * * *

From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.

I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the
ships, the ships--ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone
of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving
through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty and
wide-spread fleet.

Over all that great expanse of the North Sea, where, in its most
populous days of trade, the sailor might perhaps sight a sail or two, I
had now at every moment at least ten or twelve within scope of the
glass, oftentimes as many as forty, forty-five.

And very still they lay on a still sea, itself a dead thing, livid as
the lips of death; and there was an intensity in the calm that was
appalling: for the ocean seemed weighted, and the air drugged.