But, nevertheless, the moment I emerged through the little companion-hatch, with its load of warm atmosphere closing behind me in a sensible pressure of mingled cabin smells and heat, I felt better; a shout of bright strong moonlight wind fair betwixt my parted lips swept away for the time all sensation of nausea: I breathed deep and looked about with wonder.
It was a fine, noble night-scene of water and ship. We were following the tug under three topsails and a main topgallant sail and a flight of fore and aft canvas; the sails swelled pale as steam into the moonlight air, carrying the eye to the fine points of the mastheads, whose black lines were beating time for a dance of stars. High up was the moon, full, yellow, and glowing; if land was near, it was buried in the wild windy sheen under the orb; the water rolled in liquid silver, islanded here and there by the black flying shadows of bodies of vapour hurling headlong, down the wind north-east: ahead the black smear of the tug's smoke full of sparks, with a frequent rush of crimson flame out of the funnel's throat, was flying low.
Captain Burke came from the pilot's side to salute me, and pointing abeam to starboard (I offer no excuse for writing of the sea in the language of the sea) exclaimed:
'There's Whitstable somewhere down there, Miss Otway. And yonder should be Herne Bay. With a powerful telescope we should presently be able to see the bathing machines on Margate beach.'
'What is that out there?' I asked.
'A Geordie,' he answered, 'a north-country collier.'
She was swarming along, a very spectre of a ship, lean, visionary, glistening like the inside of an oyster shell in the moonlight, which whitened the black hull of her into the same sort of misty sheen that was upon the water, till she was blended with the air brimful of moonlight, making a mocking phantom of her to fit in with the desolation beyond, where you saw a red star of warning hinting at ooze, and white crawling streaks and a pallid rib or two, with some fragment of mast upward pointing in a finger of wreck, dumbly telling you whither the spirit of the rest of it all had flown.