was; that their sailing together was done.... A sympathetic disorder
was brewing deep down on the ocean floor; the water now had a charged
appearance, and was foul as the roadstead along the mouths of the
Godivari--a thick, whipped, yeasty look. The changes were very rapid.
Every few seconds, Bedient glanced at the Captain, and as often
followed his gaze into the churning, blackening North.

A chill came into the deathly heat, but it was the cold of caverns, not
of the vital open. The heat did not mix with it, but passed by in
layers--a novel movement of the atmospheres. Had the coolness been
clean and normal, the sailors would have sprung to the rigging to
breathe it, and to bare their bodies to the rain--after two days of
hell-pervading calm--but they only murmured now and fell to work.

An unearthly glitter, like the coloring of a dream, wavered in the East
and West, while the North thickened and the South lay still in
brilliant expectation.... In some hall-way when Bedient was a little
boy, he recalled a light like this of the West and East. There had been
a long narrow pane of yellow-green glass over the front door. The light
used to come through that in the afternoon and fill the hall and
frighten him. It was so on deck now.

The voices of the sailors had that same unearthly quality as the
light--ineffectual, remote. Out of the hold of the _Truxton_ came a
ghostly sigh. Bedient couldn't explain, unless it was some new and
mighty strain upon the keel and ribs.

A moment more and the Destroyer itself was visible in the changing
North. It was sharp-lined--a great wedge of absolute night--and from
it, the last vestiges of day dropped back affrighted. And Bedient heard