“ By those up on that hill is heard a faint roar in the distance, followed by a whistling sound, and the air above—all round—is full of crackling reports, shouts, oaths, and groans. Bullets tear the earth on all sides, and the steel gun-shields ring out like gongs under their blows. Everything except the dreadful sounds becomes blurred in the puffs of acrid, tinted smoke which the wind drives across the hilltop. ”

“ The Glarus floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.
She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us, the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand. We saw her plainly—saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her—but she moved. ”

“ Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety. But Skavinski felt more happiness than ever in life before. He rose with the dawn, took his breakfast, polished the lens, and then sitting on the balcony gazed into the distance of the water; and his eyes were never sated with the pictures which he saw before him. On the enormous turquoise ground of the ocean were to be seen generally flocks of swollen sails gleaming in the rays of the sun so brightly that the eyes were blinking before the excess of light. ”

“ On the other side of the balcony Skavinski saw, as if on his palm, Aspinwall and its busy harbour, and in it a forest of masts, boats and craft; a little farther, white houses and the towers of the town. From the height of his tower the small houses were like the nests of sea-mews, the boats were like beetles and the people moved around like small points on the white boulevard. From early morning a light eastern breeze brought a confused hum of human life, above which predominated the whistle of steamers. ”

“ That same evening, when the sun had descended on the other side of the isthmus, and a day of sunshine was followed by a night without twilight, the new keeper was in his place evidently, for the lighthouse was casting its bright rays on the water as usual. The night was perfectly calm, silent, genuinely tropical, filled with a transparent haze, forming around the moon a great coloured rainbow with soft, unbroken edges; the sea was moving only because the tide raised it. Skavinski on the balcony seemed from below like a small black point. ”

“ But as day after day I came out on deck at noon, after ascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a reach of empty paper) , the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me with an infinitely great awesomeness—and I was no new hand to high seas even then.
But at such times the Glarus seemed to me to be threading a loneliness beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate. Even in more populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the horizon, the propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing understood, and to an unappreciated degree comforting. ”

“ The huge dirigible nosed her way upward like a mounting dragon-fly. They passed through a fleece of cloud that touched them caressingly like soft fingers. The noise of battle beneath them faded into a vibrating bass chord. The propellers purred like giant cats.
"She answered like a blood mare," said the navigator, pride ringing in his voice.
"If only my guns and bombs go as well as your planes," Meriwell told him, "I'll be satisfied."
"They will, never fear," the navigator laughed.
They were all proud of her, navigator, gunnery lieutenant, engineers, and crew. ”

“ Farther on, between Aspinwall and Panama, was a great forest over which every morning and evening hung a reddish haze of exhalations,—a real tropical forest with its feet in stagnant water, interlaced with lianas and filled with the sound of one sea of gigantic orchids, palms, milk-trees, iron-trees, gum-trees.
Through his field-glass the old man could see not only trees and the broad leaves of bananas, but even legions of monkeys and great marabous and flocks of parrots, rising at times like a rainbow cloud over the forest. ”

“ It was some time about the middle of the fifth day—two men were lying stricken in the forecastle—the boatswain and a couple of seamen came aft to the quarter-deck where I was standing. The wheel was deserted: no man had grasped it since the captain's death; indeed, there was nothing to be done at the helm. The ocean floated in liquid glass; the smell of frying paint, bubbled into cinders by the roasting rays, rose like the stench of a second plague to the nostrils. ”

“ Hardly has it nestled, with much heaving of billowy sides, into its hollow, when the eye is attracted by something dancing up and down among the brushwood close to it. It is an oblong framework, partially covered with dirty gray canvas, which has commenced to make sundry abortive little swoops up into the air, ending in abrupt dives down again to earth. Finally this weird kite—for kite it is—makes up its mind and sails steadily upward to the tune of its whining cable-drum. Up, up it goes, holding well in the strong breeze till it becomes a mere speck in the sky. ”

“ A great fear came on him, as it might come on a man swimming in the ocean far from sight of land or sail. They had no right to be there, he said to himself fiercely, no right to be high among the winds. They were intruders, impertinently encroaching on the domain of some Power whose inalienable domain the air was. They might irritate It, who had placed them on the earth to walk with feet on it and not above it to fly with wings. At any moment It might arise and smite their meagre human device of gas and steel as a man might smash a fly on the wall. ”

“ Another time perhaps such a place will not offer itself. What luck that I was in Panama! I entreat you—as God is dear to me, I am like a ship which if it misses the harbour will be lost. If you wish to make an old man happy—I swear to you that I am honest, but—I have enough of wandering."
The blue eyes of the old man expressed such earnest entreaty that Falconbridge, who had a good, simple heart, was touched.
"Well," said he, "I'll take you. You are a lighthouse keeper." ”

“ How does it happen that the presence of a woman overwhelms us so? Is it the power of her grace which infolds us? Is it the seduction in her beauty and youth, which intoxicates one like wine?
"Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?
"The silence of the shades and of the sky became dreadful, because we could thus hear vaguely about us an infinite low roar, the dull sound of the rising sea, and the monotonous dashing of the waves against the ship. ”

“ The lens of the lantern cast into the darkness an enormous triangle of light, beyond which the eye of the old man was lost in the black distance completely, in the distance mysterious and awful. But that distance seemed to run toward the light. The long waves following one another rolled out from the darkness, and went bellowing toward the base of the island; and then their foaming backs were visible, shining rose-coloured in the light of the lantern. The incoming tide swelled more and more and covered the sandy bars. ”

“ The Commander, from his lowly position, looks up and nods to a signaller standing up on a mound; the latter drops his flag.
The air is split by the noise of the whole line of guns as they open rapid fire. It is like the report of one piece prolonged into a continuous long note.
Upon the brow of that hill of doom, hiding the sky-line for perhaps 400 yards to the right of the now obscured poplar, appears a crown of magenta-coloured smoke, out of which a succession of light flashes sparkle. ”

“ The dirigible shivered and jumped like a restive horse as the gunners heaved on their switches and the weighted bombs dropped from their cages. A searchlight caught the great hawk for a moment and showed it gray and lustrous like a battleship at sea. The navigator swung his wheel about with a jerk. The dirigible turned like a hare. The propellers burst into a wild, spasmodic hum. They oscillated dangerously. Meriwell clung onto the side and looked over. ”

“ Meriwell said to himself. "We ought to be rising now."
He glanced across to where the steersman stood cowled and rigid at his wheel, his slim, tall form suggested more than defined by the hooded electric lights. Beside him poring over compass and map, his pale lawyer's face showing up like that of a hunting-bird, was the navigating lieutenant. In the shadows, leaning over the edge of the car, as a captain leans over his flying bridge, was the flight commander, old Colonel Sanderson. Meriwell glanced surreptitiously at his square-cut, tow-like beard and bowed engineer's shoulders. ”

“ There was another circumstance which tended to restore my self-possession; and this was the cessation of the wind, which could not reach us in our present situation—for, as you saw yourself, the belt of surf is considerably lower than the general bed of the ocean, and this latter now towered above us, a high, black, mountainous ridge. If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. ”

“ The courses swung to the swell without response to the breathings of the air; and on high the light cotton-white royals were scarcely curved by the delicate passage of the draught.
Yet the barque had steerage way. When I looked through the grating at her metalled forefoot I saw the ripples plentiful as harp strings threading aft, and whilst I dried myself I watched the slow approach of a piece of timber hoary with barnacles, and venerable with long hairs of seaweed, amid and around which a thousand little fish were sporting, many-coloured as though a rainbow had been shivered. ”

“ At last it seems to him that the heavens, the water, his rock, the tower, the golden sand-banks and the swollen sails, the sea-mews, the ebb and flow of the tide—all form a mighty unity. One enormous mysterious soul; that he is sinking in that mystery and feels that soul which lives and lulls itself. He sinks and is rocked, forgets himself ”

“ When it is flood, the stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts, the noise being heard several leagues off; and the vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to pieces against the rocks ”

“ A colleague of the Royal Artillery, a blunt old fighter, with a cropped gray moustache, had told him about it, tactfully, laconically, with a fighter's sympathy. He told him how the gray-haired lady had died—very dignified, as she had been in life; very peaceful, as befitted an upright gentlewoman, her calm features mercifully unmarked. He stumbled as he spoke of the young captain, for a soldier should die on the battlefield, with guns roaring and his men about him, instead of being potted like a rat in a corn-stack. ”

“ He felt as if the souls of all the dead fighters of the empire were rising up against them in a vast current of wings, Saxon men and Prussian and Hessian, soldiers of Bavaria and of Würtemberg, levies of the Hansa towns—striking at the steel bird with ineffectual, spiritual fingers, clinging pathetically to rigging and nacelle and plane, gazing hatefully at the invaders with horrible bloodshot, unbodily eyes....
The navigator turned suddenly to the man at the wheel.
"What the deuce is wrong with you?" he raged. "Starboard, I said. Starboard!"
The steersman bent to the wheel. ”

“ The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher—hold on to the grass if you feel giddy—so—and look out, beyond the belt of vapour beneath us, into the sea."
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. ”

“ Meriwell asked.
"South of Maastricht," the lieutenant answered. He was as excited as a schoolboy. "We'll be over the border in a minute." He leaned toward the wind-gauge. "Doing seventy-two miles an hour," he shouted after the engineer.
It was warmer now. Meriwell glanced at the scale beside the barometer and saw it registered two thousand five hundred feet. Vague, clean scents stole through the wind—the white odour of hawthorn and the freshness of spring grass and early flowers, and the transparent odour of the wind, like the transparent taste of water. ”

“ Though the elements seemed at peace, there was clear evidence that man was not, for here and there could be seen the angry glow of a conflagration with its pall of black smoke. In places the dirty-white dust-clouds betrayed the movement of masses, though the masses were not visible, while over certain spots thick clusters of smoke-puffs, suddenly breaking out like signal flags from the halliards of a ship, showed where shrapnel shell were raining down destruction. ”