Thus they would stand, silent and awed, for long minutes at a time.
Was there nothing to break the dread stillness? There was occasionally the flap of a sail, or a footstep forward; but no song from the men, no loud talking—they hardly cared to speak above a whisper. But more than once a plash was heard, and a great dark head would appear from the side of a billow, seen distinctly enough in the gleam of the starlight, then sink and disappear.
“Oh, the awful beast, ’Ansey! Can it climb up and swallow us?”
“No, dear silly, no.”
But older people than Nelda have been frightened by such dread spectres appearing close to a ship at night while in the doldrums, and wiser heads than hers have been puzzled to account for them.
Are they sharks? No, no. Five times as large are they as any shark ever seen. Whales? No, again. A whale lives not under the water but on it.
In the ocean wild and wide, reader, we sailors find many a strange mystery, see many a fearsome sight at night we can neither describe nor explain. And if we talk of these when we come on shore, you landsmen look incredulous.
But after a time the child became accustomed to scenes like these. Indeed the sea by night appeared to have a kind of fascination for her.
In beholding it, she appeared to be looking through it into some strange land, the abode of the fairies and elves and mermaids with which her imagination had peopled it.
“Deep, deep down among the rocks,” she would say to Ransey, “who lives there? Tell us, tell us.”