"Why don't you lie down and get some sleep?" she exclaimed.
"I shall keep awake," he answered, "until I have shot the sun, and then perhaps I may sleep for an hour, weather permitting."
As he spoke these words he was looking at the sea right abeam, and held up his hand in a gesture of wonder, which arrested something that Julia was about to say.
"Good God!" cried Hardy. "What's going on there?"
It was about a mile and a half off, and just in that place the sea was working in a sort of convulsion, coil upon coil of dark blue brine wound round and round like mighty sea snakes, whose sport was as deadly as the pursuit of the harpooned dolphin. These amazing throes of brine upon which the sun was sweetly shining, and from which and to which the summer breast of ocean breathed in the rejoicing of the early morning, in a minute or two grew savage with snaps and leaps of foam, with prong-like upheavals of water, with crested shootings, and the area whitened to the hue of a star, and the volcanic fury began. The ship trembled. You heard no thunder of explosion; the roar of the fire under the ooze was dumb when it penetrated the spacious hall of the sea; but the raging torment was visible in a sudden mighty upheaval of foaming water, smokeless but glorious with its cloud of spray.
A miracle! From up from deepest soundings had been forked the figure of a drowned fabric, and as a ball plays poised on the feathering of a fountain so floated the form of a small vessel with two lower masts standing, crowning the summit of that fire-expelled, pyramidal, and towering volume of foam. Such sights have been witnessed at sea, for the ocean is the arena of the sublime wonder, the heart-thrilling miracle; it is the mirror of God, and unlike the land its breast reflects his lights. The lovers gazed, the dog gazed; the ship seemed to dwell under her curves of canvas as though she paused to look.
"How marvellous!" cried Julia.
Hardy rushed for the glass. He caught the poised object before it vanished. It was a little ship of old shape, high in stern, sloping thence to curved head-boards, two masts like stone columns, richly encrusted with marine growth, and lustrous as the inner shell of the oyster; the hull was of a blackish green and looked black in the glass in contrast with the white fury upon whose apex it rolled and swayed and tumbled. Then it was gone! It vanished in a cannon volley of water. The sea thereabouts ran boiling, but in a few minutes the curl of the breeze-blown surge had triumphed over the milky softness, and had the spectacle been the launch of a dead man in a sailor's shroud you could not have seen less of it.
"Was ever such a sight beheld before?" said Julia, with tremulous breath and enlarged nostrils.
"'Those who go down to the sea in ships,'" answered Hardy. "Has not that observation been made once or twice before? I believe I have been forced to read it a thousand times, for every newspaper and every book that relates to the sea quotes this Scriptural sentence, and I am weary of it."