Off the island of Socotra they found some air, and their ship began to sway. They had crossed over; they were involved now in the hazard of a new probation. The waters opened to the East, to a legend that was fabulous in ancient cities when London was sedge and mud.
“It doesn’t look as if the monsoon had broken, sir,” said Sinclair to the captain. They were on the bridge. Socotra, a serrated confusion of the horizon, was far to starboard.
“No,” said Hale. “I wish it had. We should know what to expect. The weather looks oily. I think we will have those hatch covers secured. Never know when it may break.”
But Colet was trying to puzzle out Socotra from an obscurity of cloud, sea glint, and shadow. That presence, to him, was more insistent than a monsoon which was not there.
“I’ve heard of it often enough, and there it is. Have you ever been there, captain?”
Sinclair frowned to starboard as if that shape had no right on the seas. Hale took Colet’s arm, and surveyed Socotra, with a smile.
“No, and I’ve never met a man who has. But there it always is, somehow. If you want to know about some of the things here, you’ll get it from Sinbad.”
XIV
At the saloon mess-table the guardians of the ship were allusive about her welfare. The set of a current had been adverse; she was seven miles astern of her estimated position. The signs in the heavens induced respectful references to the habits of the Arabian Gulf. The glass was briefly indicated; Colet surmised, while taking another piece of toast, that it was not happy in its divination. The high-pressure cylinder had taken to blowing through its packing; it was wheezy. “Man, yon’s a sad waste o’ power.” And one of the deckhands was sick. Fever, very likely, it was suggested.
“Or Rotterdam,” Sinclair baldly hinted.
“Aye, the heat will bring it out,” confirmed Gillespie, with luscious gravity. Then he exhibited some startling instances from the store of a long familiarity with sin. He indulged in illustrative cases with composure and fond irrelevance.
“I’ll see this man,” announced Hale, hastily rising while still the boding symptoms of another exemplary case were unfulfilled. Gillespie shook his paw in appreciative warning over sin.
Colet accompanied the captain on his way to the forecastle, and he noticed, because the master paused to inspect them, that the fore-hatches were laced over with cordage. The master disappeared within the dark aperture of the forecastle. Colet mounted the ladder to its deck. That was a noble outlook at the beginning of the day. It was dry and red-crusted, weather-stained, isolated as a vantage exposed to an immensity of light. It was solitude. It might have been as old as the sea itself, by the look of it. It was hoar with salt.
And the ship’s head was alive. It was massive but buoyant. It seemed to inflate and to mount quickly and easily with enormous intakes of air; then, sighing through its hawsepipes, it declined into the friendly rollers. If you looked overside and down, the cutwater of the ship was deep and plain in the blue transparency, coming along with unvarying confidence like the brown nose of an exploring monster. When the ship’s head plunged over a slope an acre of blinding foam spread around and swept astern, melting and sibilant.
Companies of flying-fish were surprised by that iron nose, and got up. They skittered obliquely over the bright polish of the inclines, and plumped abruptly into smooth slopes which opposed them. A family of four dolphins were there that morning. They were set in the clear glass just before the cutwater. They did not fly from it. Their bodies but revolved leisurely before it. The crescent valves in their heads could be seen sleepily opening and closing when they touched the surface, with the luxury of life in the cool fathoms. One after another idly they rolled belly up; they were merely revolving without progress, yet the fast-pursuing iron nose never reached them. It was always just behind the family, which wove a lazy and gliding dance before the ship. Artfully leading them on, these familiars of the deep?
It was a fair world into which they were being led. It reposed in an eternal radiant tranquillity. The Indian Ocean was as inviting as its name. There were clouds ahead, but they were fast to the skyline; they were as remote as the ghostly mountains and steeps of a land no man would ever reach. This world of the tropics was but an apparition of splendour. It was there by the chance of good fortune. It was seen only by the desiring mind. It was like the import of great music, for which there is no word. If you stood looking at it long enough, the bright dream would draw you out of your body.
The ship’s head fell sideways into a deeper hollow, and Colet returned without warning to an iron deck. He was swung around on his handhold. The rail he struck was hard. Steady! Solid fountains burst loudly through the hawsepipes. There was impetuosity in the lift of the ship’s
