and
continuous murmur. The lockouts in the waist, motionless and peering
into obscurity, one ear turned to the sea, were aware of that strange
resonance like the ghost of a quarrel that seemed to hover at their
backs. Wasub, after seeing Hassim and Immada into their canoe, prowled
to and fro the whole length of the vessel vigilantly. There was not
a star in the sky and no gleam on the water; there was no horizon, no
outline, no shape for the eye to rest upon, nothing for the hand to
grasp. An obscurity that seemed without limit in space and time had
submerged the universe like a destroying flood.

A lull of the breeze kept for a time the small boat in the neighbourhood
of the brig. The hoisted sail, invisible, fluttered faintly,
mysteriously, and the boat rising and falling bodily to the passage of
each invisible undulation of the waters seemed to repose upon a living
breast. Lingard, his hand on the tiller, sat up erect, expectant and
silent. Mrs. Travers had drawn her cloak close around her body. Their
glances plunged infinitely deep into a lightless void, and yet they were
still so near the brig that the piteous whine of the dog, mingled with
the angry rattling of the chain, reached their ears faintly, evoking
obscure images of distress and fury. A sharp bark ending in a plaintive
howl that seemed raised by the passage of phantoms invisible to men,
rent the black stillness, as though the instinct of the brute inspired
by the soul of night had voiced in a lamentable plaint the fear of the
future, the anguish of lurking death, the terror of shadows. Not far
from the brig's boat Hassim and Immada in their canoe, letting their
paddles trail in the water, sat in a silent and invincible torpor as
if the fitful puffs of wind had carried to their hearts the breath of a
subtle poison that, very soon, would make them die.--"Have you seen
the white woman's eyes?" cried the girl. She struck her palms together
loudly and remained with her arms extended, with her hands clasped. "O
Hassim! Have you seen her eyes shining under her eyebrows like rays of
light darting under the arched boughs in a forest? They pierced me. I
shuddered at the sound of her voice! I saw her walk behind him--and
it seems to me that she does not live on earth--that all this is
witchcraft."

She lamented in the night. Hassim kept silent. He had no illusions and
in any other man but Lingard he would have thought the proceeding no
better than suicidal folly.