Chapter 6 - Page 2

go'--between the heel of New
Zealand and the South Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer
trying to come round in the trough of a big beam sea. The wet light of
the day's end comes more from the water than the sky, and the waves are
colourless through the haze of the rain, all but two or three blind
sea-horses swinging out of the mist on the ship's dripping weather side.
A lamp is lighted in the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls
on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as they snatch up the
rudder-chains. A big sea has got home. Her stern flies up in the lather
of a freed screw, and her deck from poop to the break of the foc's'le
goes under in gray-green water level as a mill-race except where it
spouts up above the donkey-engine and the stored derrick-booms. Forward
there is nothing but this glare; aft, the interrupted wake drives far to
leeward, a cut kite-string dropped across the seas. The sole thing that
has any rest in the turmoil is the jewelled, unwinking eye of an
albatross, who is beating across wind leisurely and unconcerned, almost
within hand's touch. It is the monstrous egotism of that eye that makes
the picture. By all the rules of art there should be a lighthouse or a
harbour pier in the background to show that everything will end happily.
But there is not, and the red eye does not care whether the thing
beneath its still wings stays or staves.

The sister-panel hangs in the Indian Ocean and tells a story, but is
none the worse for that. Here you have hot tropical sunlight and a
foreshore clothed in stately palms running out into a still and steamy
sea burnished steel blue. Along the foreshore, questing as a wounded
beast quests for lair, hurries a loaded steamer never built for speed.
Consequently, she tears and threshes the water to pieces, and piles it
under her nose and cannot put it under her cleanly. Coir-coloured cargo
bales are stacked round both masts, and her decks are crammed and
double-crammed with dark-skinned passengers--from the foc's'le where
they interfere with the crew to the stern where they hamper the wheel.

The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a holiday air, a little
out of keeping with the yellow and black cholera flag at her main. She
dare not stop; she must not communicate with any one. There are leprous
streaks of lime-wash trickling down her plates for a sign of this. So
she threshes on down the glorious coast, she and her swarming
passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday eating out
her heart.

Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before we have done with
blue water. Most of the nations of the earth are at issue under a
stretch of white awning above a crowded deck. The cause of the dispute,
a