Had this man been of the earth I needed but to catch him by the scroff and breech and bring his spine to my knee to kill him. And he looked so much as if I could have served him so that it was hard to regard him without pity. I said, quietly, "Will that be the land the captain desires to make?"
"Ay," he answered, snarlingly, "the Dutch are sailors."
I thought to myself, yes, when they have the Devil for a sea-cunny they will hit their port.
"You will be glad to step ashore if but for half-an-hour?" said he, looking at me.
"That is a matter that concerns your master," I answered, turning from him. A low ha! ha! broke from him, muffled as the sound of a saw worked under deck, as musical too, and as mirthless. Yet Imogene's quick ear caught it, and she turned swiftly to look. And methought it had penetrated further yet, for upon the heels of it, there rose up, as an echo, from the cabin, that harsh and rusty cry, "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"
CHAPTER IX.
WE BRING UP IN A BAY.
I could not at that time know what part of the South African coast was this we had made, but I have since learnt that it lies a few miles to the eastward of the meridian of twenty-two degrees, and about an hundred and sixty miles from Cape Agulhas. When it first came into sight, as I have said, it was but a faint, long-drawn shade in the light blue of the sky over the horizon, with such a fairy tincture of flanking eminence beyond that the whole was as delicately tender as the visionary shore of a dream.
But before the dinner-hour had come round we had stolen nearly two leagues closer to it, and the coast lay plain enough and very brave with colours, the green of several dyes, the mountain sky-lines of an exquisite clearness of cutting in the radiant atmosphere and against the hard azure brilliance of the heavens, and the tracts of white sand low down as lustrous as the foam of a dissolving surge.