he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water
as they fell.

It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the
tallowed collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell,
another beginning the process instantly. It amused Abel Keeling to watch
them. Why (he wondered) were all the drops the same size? What cause and
compulsion did they obey that they never varied, and what frail tenuity
held the little globules intact? It must be due to some Cause.... He
remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense with which they
had parcelled the seams had hung on the buckets in great sluggish gouts,
obedient to a different compulsion; oil was different again, and so were
juices and balsams. Only quicksilver (perhaps the heavy and motionless
sea put him in mind of quicksilver) seemed obedient to no law.... Why was
it so?

Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God.
That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and
whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as
the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had
committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bligh was that
sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things
as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out
of the opalescent mists. Bligh, too, like the waterdrops, had his Law,
that was his and nobody else's....

There floated down from some rotten rope up aloft a flake of scurf, that
settled in the pipkin. Abel Keeling watched it dully as it settled
towards the pipkin's rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into
the vessel the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it.