We were off again. Somebody appeared at the doorway, a pull of cotton
waste in his hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugubrious by white
lines which sweat had channelled downwards through its coal dust. It
looked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant yet full of unutterable
reproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly. It was the second
engineer. He said it was a clear morning. We had been under way an
hour. He had got sixty revolutions now. He then receded into the gloom
beyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of two
disembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had won
seventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny about
the way the skipper shuffled cards.

Feeling as though I were in one piece, I got up, made my joints bend
again, and went on deck. Our ship, tilting at the immobile world, might
have upset the morning, which was pouring a bath of cold air over us.
The overcoat of the skipper, who was pacing the bridge, flapped in this
steady current. A low coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior to
the flawless glass of the Thames. By the look of it, we were the first
ever to break the tranquillity of that stream. We ourselves made
scarcely a sound; we could have been attempting a swift, secret and, so
far, unchallenged escape. The shores unfolded in a panorama without
form. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before
the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost
shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights
following us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn we
overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the
Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made a
course east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin and Gunfleet
lights winked in their iron gibbets. Above the shallows of the Burrows
Shoal the masts projected awry of the wreck of a three-masted schooner,