Now it was that Greaves arrived. He smoked a long curled pipe of Turkish workmanship and moved noiseless in slippers. The moonlight whitened his face and silvered his hair and blackened his eyes till, elsewhere, I might have looked twice without knowing him. We were to the southward of the Lima parallel, our course south by west. The Bolivian coast trends inward. Our course gave us to larboard a wide sweep of open ocean and this we should hold down to the latitude of 50°. After which the chance was small of our falling in with anything armed under Spanish colors.
We had made noble progress taking the days all round, and this night we were courtesying onward with a pretty breeze off the larboard beam—a wind that ran the waters gushing white to the bends, and overhead were all the stars and the moon in their midst dimming a circle of them, and under the moon the play of the sea was like a torrent of boiling silver.
“This is a desolate ocean,” said Greaves.
“So much the better for us,” said I.
“Oh, yes, so much the better for us. But the solitude of the sea is a burden that the heart don’t always beat lightly under. Is solitude a material thing? It has the weight of substance when it settles upon the spirits.”
I let him talk on. He was fond of big, fine words, and the stranger he became the more heroic grew his vein.
“Any more rows forward among the men?”
“I have heard of none.”
“I had two men who fought through a voyage. They had sailed together before and fought throughout. ‘They will fight while they meet on earth,’ said the boatswain of the ship to me, ‘and they will fight if they catch sight of each other at the Resurrection.’” He puffed a cloud of smoke upon the wind and looked round the sea. “I am unsettled in my faith,” said he, “I am troubled by doubts. I believe I am almost Roman Catholic, but lack sufficient credulity to enable me to bring up in that faith. I will tell you what I mean to believe in,” continued he, halting in his walk, compelling me to stand, and looking me full in the face; “I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls.”
“Oh, you’ll wish to choose your next body before deciding, won’t you?” said I. “You wouldn’t be a flea or a cockroach?”