Chapter 22 - Page 2

fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards
every kind of superstition; and in his many voyages across the North
Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question. He had
sat quite silent so far.

"H'm!" he remarked now, thoughtfully taking a pull at his pipe. "I dare
be sworn there's many a one out here on the Dogger. Where we are now, I
tell you, is as it might be an old burial-ground."

With that he retired into himself, and began to pull away vigorously at
his pipe, as if he had unintentionally said more than he exactly liked.
But being pressed to go on, he was obliged to satisfy the curiosity he
had excited, and resumed accordingly in a hushed tone, after cautiously
looking round first.

"Do you know," he asked, mysteriously, "how all the old fish come by
their deaths?"

None of his audience were able to give an answer to this unexpected
question.

"You don't?" he continued; "nor no one else neither. But all the same,
such myriads die every day that, if all was right, the whole surface of
the sea would be covered with their white bellies--we should be sailing
all day long through dead fish. It is a 'mystery,' the same as it is
what becomes of all the old ships in the world." Coming from him, that
word "mystery" had something very weird and uncanny about it.

"Yes, the Dogger can be ugly enough, and may be so perhaps before we are
clear of it," he concluded, and leant back against the spar behind him
to look up at the clouds. Some scud was driving at the moment across the
full moon.

"But about the old fish and the old vessels, Nils?" said the carpenter,
recalling him to the subject.

"Yes, it is here, to the Dogger Bank, that they resort for the most
part, and to one or two other places perhaps in the world besides. That
is the reason that there is always a sort of corpse sand in the water
here, and so many noises and things that one can't explain."

There was a general start as he said this, and they looked at one
another in silence; for it seemed as if the vessel had suddenly stopped
with a shock in the middle of her course, and the spray from a heavy sea
came pouring down over the deck.

"She heard it," said the carpenter, involuntarily; "she is an old craft,
and doesn't like going over the churchyard."

Elizabeth thought that last proposition sounded so uncomfortable that
she got up and went below to bed.

The sea ran high in the night, and the vessel kept pitching with dull
thuds as if they were in very shoal water, which, however, the lead
showed not to be the case. In the morning the chain-cable of the