unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms.
Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another
life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the
dawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition. The _Windhover_ alone was
substantial and definite. But placed about us, suspended in a night that
was growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have been
ships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailers
without substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that had
left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, and
were waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level in
a new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them.
There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superior
gravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there was
in this new system in another sky. Above them there was nothing, and
around them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of space. Their
lights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shining
mooring lines.

It was all so silent, too. But our incoming cable shattered the spell,
and when our siren warned them that we were moving, a wild pealing
commenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend. There
were eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargo
steamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern. More
than once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her
while he could make out a ship ahead of us. We drifted stern first on
the flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till a
boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend. And was there
any one for the shore?

There was. I took no more risks. I had been looking for that life-boat.