“And I say God bless our mothers!”
“In that one little sentence, Mr. Percivail, spoke from the heart, you have reveal the secret history of the world. You have account for everything.”
“You are a million years old, Madame Obosky,” he said, looking into her deep, unfathomable eyes.
She smiled. “So? And which of my sons, Mr. Percivail, do you think I love the most? Cain or Abel?”
“It would take a woman to answer that question. There's one thing certain, however. You loved both of them more than you loved Adam.”
“True. But I followed Adam out of the Garden of Eden and I have never left his heels from zat day to this. What more could any man ask?”
On the second morning after the storm, the lookout fixed his straining eyes on a far-distant, shadowy line that had not been a part of the boundless horizon the day before. Dawn was breaking, night was lifting her sheet from the new-born day. He waited. He could not be sure. Minutes that seemed like hours passed. Then suddenly his hoarse shout rose out of the silence:
“Land ho!”
Down into the heart of the ship boomed the cry, taken from the lookout's lips by one after another of the weary men below. The sweating, exhausted toilers who manned the pumps paused for a moment, then fell to work again revitalized. Out from the cabins, up from every nook and corner of the ship scrambled the excited horde, fully dressed, their faces haggard with doubt, their eyes aglow with joy. Land! In every round little window gleamed a face,—for a moment only along the portside. Nothing but the same endless ocean on the port side of the ship. Water! Sick and wounded drew themselves up to the portholes and peered out from their cells for the first time.
“Where?... Where?” ran the wild, eager cry of the scurrying throng, and there was disappointment—bitter disappointment in their voices. They had been tricked. There was no land in sight! The glasses of the ship's officers, clustered far forward, were directed toward some point off the starboard bow, but if there was land over there it was not visible to the naked eye. A junior engineer saluted Captain Trigger and left the group.