“She’ll bear sou’east,” he answered.
I stepped to the compass.
“There’s been a shift of wind since midnight. It was nor’-nor’west, and now it’s come north. Since when?”
“Ow, she freshened out of der north in a leedle squall. Dot vhas vhen I called you.”
I swept the wide, dark reach of the southern line of sea with the glass; but had the island been as big as England it would have been sunk in the peculiar smoky thickness of the dusk that yet, strangely enough, formed a clear atmosphere for the stars to shine through. I say I swept the ocean with the glass, but to no purpose. An old sailor once laughed at me for using an ordinary day telescope at night. I told him that what would magnify a colored object would magnify a shadow; and he afterward owned that he talked out of prejudice; had looked through a telescope since in the darkness and discovered that I was right.
The men reefed the topsails smartly, and not being able to see the island, and not choosing to trust Bol’s conjectures as to its situation, I headed the brig due east, setting the reefed foresail and trysail along with some fore-and-aft canvas to give her heels. It blackened rapidly overhead; every star perished. In a few minutes there was not a light visible up in God’s heights; all the fire was below, and the sea was beginning to run in flames like oil burning. This shining in the sea was a blindness to the sight, for it brought the sky down black as a midnight fog to the very sip and spit of the surge. We held on, crushing through it, for the wind having swiftly swept up into a fresh breeze, had on a sudden roared into half a gale, and the brig was smoking forward as she plunged, with a heel to leeward when the sea took her, that brought the white and fiery smother within hand-reach of the gangway rails.
I stood at the binnacle; Bol was at my side; two hands were stationed on the lookout; the crew remained on deck. They had got to hear that Bol had lost the bearings of the island, and though the watch might be called, no man was going below on such a night of sudden tempest as this, with a hurricane away behind the windward blackness, for all we knew, and this side the horizon as deadly a heap of fangs as ever bit a ship in twain.
“I vhas glad if he lightened,” said Bol. “It vhas strange if der island did not show on der starboard quarter there.”
“It was strange,” said I, mimicking him in my temper, “that you should fall asleep in your watch on deck with land close aboard ye.”
“By Cott, den——”