“Do you mean a shooting star, captain?” cried Bol.
“Yan Bol,” said Greaves, nudging me as we stood side by side, “you have much to learn. Do not you know that the stars are often falling? They drop into other worlds than ours. Sometimes they plump into our earth, fizz into the sea, and lie on the ooze, shining for awhile and making queer lights upon the water like that yonder.”
Bol breathed deeply. He could read, indeed; but he was as ignorant, prejudiced, and grossly superstitious as most forecastle hands in his day—fitter for the faiths of a Finn than a Hollander. He stared at the advancing whiteness, and seemed not to know what to make of the captain’s discourse. “Yes,” continued Greaves, “they are frequently falling. They are the stars which were loosed in the pavement of heaven when the angels fell. There should be many more stars than there are. Unhappily, when Lucifer was hurled over the battlements he swept away a number of stars with his tail and loosened many more, and it is those which drop.”
“Der toyfell!” muttered Bol. “Von lifs und larns.”
“It is a wonderful sight,” said I, gazing with astonishment, not wholly unmixed, at the mighty whiteness that was coming along.
Already on high the verge of the startling milky reflection was over our fore royal masthead. You might look straight up now and see no stars. The line of the flaring whiteness upon the sea was a little more than a mile distant. The wind blew softly, and before it the brig floated onward, meeting the coming whiteness with an occasional flap of canvas that fell upon the ear like a note of alarm from aloft.
“Did you never before see the white water, Fielding?” exclaimed Greaves.
“Never, sir.”
“I have sailed through it three times,” said he. “Once off Natal, once in Indian, and once in China seas. I did not know it was to be met with on this side the world; but everything is probable and possible at sea. I tell you what, Bol,” he exclaimed, calling across to the Dutchman, who had gone to the side to stare, and was holding on to a shroud, or backstay, with his big body painted black as ink against the whiteness that was coming along, “I believe I am mistaken, after all. It is not a star; it is an insect.”
“I likes to handle dot insect. I likes her in der forecastle to read by und light my pipe by,” said Bol, with a coarse, heavy, uneasy laugh, that sounded like the bray of an ass.