William Clark Russell

“ They watched the fish turning their solemn somersaults until they were out of sight, and then, as though to meet hope half-way, Holdsworth swarmed up the boat’s mast and swept the horizon with piercing eyes, but saw nothing but the boundless water-line paling away against the sky.
The sun went down in glorious majesty, burnishing the deep, and dazzling the eye with a splendour of small radiant clouds, pierced with threads of glory, and momentarily changing their brilliant hues until the orb was under the sea, when they turned a bright red colour. ”

“ There was a great deal of greenish fire in the sea, and it broadened and shrank in wide spaces in the lift of the noiseless running swell as though the rays of a tinted lantern were cast upon the water. The dew was plentiful, and lay along the rails and upon the skylight, crisp as frost in the starshine.
It was Abraham's watch, and I spied his figure flitting cumbrously in the neighbourhood of the wheel, at which stood the shape of some coloured man, motionless as though carved in ebony, faintly touched by the sheen of the binnacle lamp. I was in no humour to converse with the boatman. ”

“ Times are when the deep flings its own prismatic glories upon the sky. This have I marked at sunrise, when the flash of the luminary has sunk into the heart of the sea, when all is blueness and dazzle below, and, above, a sky of high-compacted cloud, delicate as flowers and figures of frost and snow upon a windowpane, charged with the colors of the great eye of ocean looking up at it.
“There’s the island,” said I to myself.
I snatched up the glass, and resolved the tiny piece of shading upon the horizon into the proportions of the ugly rock of cinders. ”

“ The swell was full of foreboding; it was as my heart had foreseen, spite of the wonder and inventions of my imagination; but nevertheless, the perception of that polished sea heaving into the dimness of the distant sky, the sight of the deadness of the calm that had slued the Death Ship till her sprit-topsail veiled and disclosed the oozing sun as she bowed with her beak pointing into the east, brought a disappointment that sickened me to the soul.
"Great God," I cried within myself, "is this experience to end only with my death!" ”

“ She had something of the look of the barca-longas of half a century ago—that is, half a century ago from the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a man would have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred and rigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the genius or spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete the mocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deck with a human face toughened into an idle eternal contemplation. ”

“ I saw you enter the boat and sail into the bay. The sun was high and all was bright and clear; but on a sudden the weather grew black—dark as it now is. The wind swept the water, which leaped high and boiled. You and the men strove hard to regain the land, and then gave up in despair, and you put right before the wind, and the boat sped like an arrow into the gloom and haze; and just before she vanished a figure rose by your side where you sat steering, and gazed at me thus'—she placed her forefinger upon her lip in the posture of one commanding silence. ”

“ The Spaniard's prayers were not mine, his religion was not mine; but what signifies that, thought I, as I stood listening and gazing; every man sets his watch in the dark, and it is but reasonable that every man should think his own time right.
The night wind, damp with dew, hummed in the rigging; the dark water broke from the gentle thrust of the stem in sobs, while Don Lazarillo prayed, and while Mariana ejaculated. As my eye went to the pale glimmering shape of the canvas I heard again the sounds of the sweet tenor voice as it had quietly rung through the open skylight that morning. ”

“ The moon was rising at this moment on our starboard beam, an arch of blood defining the indigo-black line of the horizon there that on either hand of her went melting out into a blending of starladen sky, with the dark and gleaming ocean brimming to the yacht, vast as the heavens themselves looked. Presently up through the hatch rose the figures of Captain Finn and the two men, swaying under the weight of the canvas-shrouded form they bore. The watch on deck came aft and gathered about the gangway, where they glimmered like visionary creatures to the dull, yellow shining of the lamps. ”