Divisional Intelligence Report.
XII
Following a roaster of day, with a slack wind astern covering the deck forward with showers of cinders like shot, I admired the moonlight and the sweet night air before I turned in to sleep soundly. I woke thinking I heard the usual swabbing of decks beginning, but this was incorrect. It was quite dark, and I began to think with gratitude of a second innings of sleep; but when I looked at my watch it was after seven. The din of water outside, mingled with the rushing of a mighty wind, persuaded me to go to the door. In a few moments the storm was at its height, the sea shrouded in a thick deluge almost to the ship’s side, and its waves beaten down by the rain into pallid foam-veined inertia. An ashen grey light was about us, but the clouds of rain veiled the poop from one’s eyes amidships, and the siren trumpeted out its warnings; while sheet-like lightning flamed through the vapours, and bursts of deeper thunder than I had ever heard followed hard upon them. The decks were racing with water from overhead covers and stairways, and in each lifting of the storm the awning over the sailors’ quarters aft could be seen tearing at its tethers.
This fury soon slackened, and green and blue, pale as yet, returned to the seas as they leapt away from the bows. Breakfast intervened. Attention was requested from the storm by the appearance of a new and experimental kind of ham.
“Yes. What d’ye think of the ham–tinned boneless smoked ham?”
“Well, I like it well enough; but it’s boneless. If you take the bone away from ham, you take away the nature of it.”
This ham later on became much esteemed, but the ingenious mind was for dissembling the fact: “We’d better not give a too enthusiastic report on it or they’ll only give it to the passenger boats” of the same company.
It was blowing still, from the coast of South America. “Smell the mould?” asked Hosea, and I did; a strange frightening fragrance, of the earth earthy, a heavy and swooning smell. It was so strong as to puzzle Bicker even, in his watch; and its most unpleasant manifestation caused him to look about for the carcass of a rat on the bridge deck.
We had come by this time into a highway of ships. The first that passed us, a small steamer, was not much noticed; nor the next, which passed in the night. “Her lamp gave a blink and then went out,” said Bicker, and wished he could have emulated a mate of his acquaintance who likewise signalled to a passer-by in vain. “If you damn’d foreigners can’t answer,” he sent out as she came alongside presently, “why the hell don’t you keep out of sight? Good night!” But, on being pressed, he admitted that the “foreigner” replied: “Thank you. And you’re a lady.”