Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship had vanished.
There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the sight.
“The ship!” he cried. “Where is the ship and the master?”
The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.
“My God!” I said. “How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!”
The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.
“No,” he said, “they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think it was?”
“I don't know,” I answered. “The creature in the English uniform said that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”
“Ram Chad was right,” replied the Highlander. “The British government neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize what your uncle was doing here?”
“Molding images of Buddha,” I said.