“No, no; there was no chance of anything of the sort,” answered Van Graoul. “That firing, if firing it is, comes from the sea, I tell you.”
The evening was now approaching, and still the mystery was not solved. At distant intervals, we continued to hear the sound of firing; but when darkness came on, we could nowhere see the flashes of the guns, as we expected. A light breeze at length sprung up from the eastward; but it was still hot and oppressive, and it in no way refreshed us. Anxious to discover, if possible, the cause of the firing, we trimmed sails and stood to the southward; but with the light air there was blowing we made but little way. The night appeared very long. I turned in for a couple of hours, but the heat soon again drove me on deck. When daylight appeared, we were on the look-out, almost expecting to see some of the vessels which had been engaged the previous day; but as the sun arose there was nothing in sight but the deep blue silent sea on three sides, and to the south the lofty hills of a large island, and at one end the peaks of a mountain towering over the rest. There was, instead of the bright, pure, clear atmosphere which generally exists at that hour, a very peculiar lurid glare, which, as the sun rolled upwards in his course, increased in intensity, till the sky became of almost a copper hue. Fairburn had gone aloft with his glass, to satisfy himself more fully as to there being anything in sight from the point where the firing had proceeded. He now returned on deck.
“I cannot make it out,” he remarked. “After all, I am not so certain that it was firing we heard. Away to the southward, there is a dense black cloud which seems rising rapidly, as if it would cover all the sky.”
We looked in the direction he indicated; and there, even while he was speaking, we observed the approach of a cloud, or rather I should call it a dense mist, so completely without break of any sort did it occupy the whole horizon. It looked like an opaque mass of some substance, borne onward by some invisible power towards us. Van Graoul, whose equanimity nothing extraordinary could disturb, likened it to the wall of China painted black, and taking a cruise to the southward.
“Is there any wind in it, do you think?” asked Fairburn. “It does not seem to ruffle the surface.”
“No wind, I think,” said Van Graoul; “but better shorten sail; the canvas does no good.”
Such also was Fairburn’s opinion, and accordingly the schooner was made snug to meet the hurricane should it arrive.
The crew were clustering in groups on deck watching the strange appearance, and in suppressed voices asking each other what it could mean. The more nervous already began to give way to fear; and the bravest were not altogether free from apprehension that some awful catastrophe was about to occur. The Javanese declared that it portended great convulsions in their country, and perhaps the overthrow of the ruling powers. Some of the more credulous of the seamen began to connect it, in some way or other, with the sudden disappearance of the strange brig.
“I knowed it would be so,” muttered Dick Harper. “I never yet heard of any one coming across those fly-away, never-find-me sort of chaps we met t’other day, but what was sure to get into mischief afore long.”
These, and similar observations, according to the temper and the natural prejudices of the speakers, by degrees spread an undefined apprehension of evil among all the crew; and fellows who, I believe, would have faced any known danger, and struggled manfully with death to the last, were now full of fear, and ready to be startled at the sound of a gun, or even the flap of a sail. On came the dark mass, as it approached assuming a dusky red appearance, which much increased its terrors. In a short time it covered the whole sky, and a darkness deeper than night came on. There was only one clear space, just like a gleam of light, seen at the end of a cavern, and that was away to the eastward, whence the light wind then blowing came; and even that was growing narrower and narrower. The darkness increased; the hearts of all of us, I believe, sunk; the light in the east, our last ray of hope, which till now had tended somewhat to cheer our spirits, totally disappeared, and we all began to feel that death, in some horrible, undefined shape, might speedily be our lot. It was dark before, as dark as night, but still we might have made out a vessel at the distance of a quarter of a mile; now we could scarcely see the length of the schooner. We were, when the darkness began, to the best of our knowledge, some distance from any land, or reefs, or shoals, and we trusted that no current might be carrying us towards any dangers, for we were utterly unable to protect ourselves against them.