set I up with you
And your posterity_--"

It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist. Abel Keeling's mind
was once more a blank. Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected
on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again.

A galliasse? No, not a galliasse. The galliasse made shift to be two
things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day
make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and
conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her
victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning
the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her
force must be wind--stored wind--a bag of the winds, as the children's
tale had it--wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it
away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a
wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps.... Bligh would
call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the
future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the
mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white
timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him....

Bligh's face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the
faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps.
His voice beat uncontrolledly out.

_"And in the earth here is no place
Of refuge to be found,
Nor in the deep and water-course
That passeth under ground--"_

II

Bligh's eyes were lidded, as if in contemplation of his inner ecstasy.
His head was thrown back, and his brows worked up and down tormentedly.
His wide mouth remained open as his hymn was suddenly interrupted on the
long-drawn note. From somewhere in the shimmering mists the note was
taken up, and there drummed and rang and reverberated through the strait
a windy, hoarse, and dismal bellow, alarming and sustained. A tremor rang
through Bligh. Moving like a sightless man, he stumbled forward from the
head of the quarter-deck steps, and Abel Keeling was aware of his gaunt
figure behind him, taller for the steepness of the deck. As that vast
empty sound died away, Bligh laughed in his mania.

"Lord, hath the grave's wide mouth a tongue to praise Thee? Lo, again--"

Again the cavernous sound possessed the air, louder and nearer. Through
it came another sound, a slow throb, throb--throb