l
opal, the light fell and spread from bight to bight, and crag to crag;
and above there were sheets of eruptive flame and great rumblings, and
mighty arcs of fire spanning the whole heavens, and gripping them as
with the glittering jewelled hand of some monstrous keeper of the skies
whose mutterings came to us below. Or the scene changed again, and it
was as though elves of the zenith had brought their golden caskets
above the firmament, and there had burst them open, so that all the
jewels of the light rained upon sea and land, and burnt each other with
their own beauty as they fell; and the earth answered them back with
her shining face. One of the supreme moments of life, truly, to bathe
in this shower of multi-coloured splendour, to follow it in its golden
path, where rocks took shape, and snow-forms lived, and the seas danced
to its accompanying music, and one stood nearer to the great mysteries
while yet farther from the homes of man.

Black watched the aurora as we watched it, but chiefly as it played
upon his ship, lying moored in the very centre of the outer basin. They
had made a great change in her since I had seen her but two days
before; for she was now given bulwarks of white canvas, and her funnel
was painted white, while covers hid away the bright points of her
deck-houses and her turrets. She had become a white ship; and her
transformation had been made with vast skill, so that I felt I should
not have known her had I met her in the Atlantic. From her position
away from the shaft of the mine, it was evident that she was ready to
weigh, and I was reminded grimly of her mission by seeing a streamer of
black at her mast-head instead of the Blue Peter. This time, too, there
was a faint haze above her funnel, as though coal was being burnt in
her furnaces; yet I had no wonder that I did not see steam coming from
her, for I knew that she was driven by gas, and was in many ways a ship
of mystery.

We boarded her at a ladder amidships, for the most part of her
accommodation was contained in a towering deck erection round her
funnel. Here there were two stages of cabins with a wide gallery
running between them, and protruding so that it was directly above the
water. There was, indeed, a companion-way aft of this which led to the
cabin I had occupied when a prisoner in the ship, and I found at a
later time that the library of the vessel, with the store-rooms and a
number of private cabins, was built in the 'tw