Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with
nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from
earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the
north. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over the
seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail,
heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a baffling
mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. She
got abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to
give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship
of romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when it
mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the
meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist
blown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Her
green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows pressed continually
onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as
though enchanted. Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us under
the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body.
She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms
do.


7

When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke
me, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac.
"We're bewitched," the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. "I
never thought I should want to see our fleet so much."

"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some