As daylight crept over the east, Jack, with a horrible sinking feeling of dismay, felt his returned eyesight gradually fail again.
As the deep indigo of the night gave way before the rosy beams of the morning sun and the moon lost its glitter, Jack saw a mist of grey slowly spreading before him; then, as the light of day increased, the grey merged into a black, which grew darker and darker, until the rover felt as if he was being pressed down by an awful pall of ink, pierced by tiny shafts, glinting flickers, and hovering waves of flashing, scintillating light, which splashed through the black curtain for all the world like the Northern Lights.
Great was the distress of his companions on hearing of this return of the evil.
Jack took his misfortune very quietly, and stretched himself in the bottom of the boat with a great show of fortitude and resignation.
"Keep a look-out for the island," he murmured, and then lay silent with closed eyelids, which he found afforded him some relief from the shafts of light which leaked in through the black shroud of his blindness and burnt his aching eyeballs.
A heavy feeling of depression weighed down upon the boat's crew, and Broncho's many attempts to break it only served to increase it.
Jim felt cowed and frightened; Tari, always of a singularly silent disposition, remained mute in the bows, and whilst Jack tried hard to respond to Broncho's sallies, his tortured brain refused to follow the thread of the discourse, and he found himself answering at random and listening without hearing.
About noon, Jim, who was on look-out duty forward, sang out excitedly that he saw something ahead, sticking out of the sea.
"Looks like a ship's mast," he cried, "but there don't seem no yards or sails on it, 'cept what looks like a flag flying at the truck."