Chapter 8

For a while after his second's answering hoot Massy hung over the
engine-room gloomily. Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred
pounds, had kept his command for three years, might have been suspected
of never having seen that coast before. He seemed unable to put down his
glasses, as though they had been glued under his contracted eyebrows.
This settled frown gave to his face an air of invincible and just
severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration
poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at
the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose
blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust.

From time to time, still holding up his glasses, he raised his other
hand to wipe his streaming face. The drops rolled down his cheeks, fell
like rain upon the white hairs of his beard, and brusquely, as if guided
by an uncontrollable and anxious impulse, his arm reached out to the
stand of the engine-room telegraph.

The gong clanged down below. The balanced vibration of the dead-slow
speed ceased together with every sound and tremor in the ship, as if the
great stillness that reigned upon the coast had stolen in through
her sides of iron and taken possession of her innermost recesses. The
illusion of perfect immobility seemed to fall upon her from the luminous
blue dome without a stain arching over a flat sea without a stir. The
faint breeze she had made for herself expired, as if all at once the air
had become too thick to budge; even the slight hiss of the water on her
stem died out. The narrow, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple,
seemed to approach the shoal water of the bar by stealth. The plunge of
the lead with the mournful, mechanical cry of the lascar came at longer
and longer intervals; and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their
breath. The Malay at the helm looked fixedly at the compass card, the
Captain and the Serang stared at the coast.

Massy had left the skylight, and, walking flat-footed, had returned
softly to the very spot on the bridge he had occupied before. A slow,
lingering grin exposed his set of big white teeth: they gleamed evenly
in the shade of the awning like the keyboard of a piano in a dusky room.

At last, pretending to talk to himself in excessive astonishment, he
said not very loud--

"Stop the engines now. What next, I wonder?"

He waited, stooping from the shoulders, his head bowed, his glance
oblique. Then raising his voice a shade--

"If I dared make an absurd remark I would say that you haven't the
stomach to . . ."

But a yelling spirit of excitement, like some frantic soul wandering
unsuspected in the vast