at sleep was out of
the question, and I leaned upon the rail of the bridge, the hot land
breeze, laden with the mysterious odors of the tropics, beating softly
in my face, and listlessly watched the phosphorescent ostrich feathers
curling from our bows. Behind me, in the darkened chart-room, the
Filipino quartermaster gently swung the wheel from time to time in
response to the direction of the needle on the illuminated
compass-dial. So lifeless was the sea that our foremast barely swayed
against the stars. The smoke from our funnel trailed across the purple
canopy of the sky as though smeared with an inky brush.

How long I stood there, lost in reverie, I have no idea: hours no
doubt. I must have fallen into a doze, for I was awakened by the brisk,
incisive strokes of the ship's bell, echoed, a moment later, by eight
fainter strokes coming from the deck below. Then the soft patter of
bare feet which meant the changing of the watch. Though the velvety
darkness into which we were steadily ploughing had not perceptibly
decreased, it was now cut sharply across, from right to left, by what
looked like a tightly stretched wire of glowing silver. Even as I
looked this slender fissure of illumination widened, almost
imperceptibly at first, then faster, faster, until at one burst came
the dawn. The sombre hangings of the night were swept aside by an
invisible hand as are drawn back the curtains at a window. As you have
seen from a hill the winking lights of a city disappear at daybreak,
so, one by one, the stars went out. Masses of angry clouds reared
themselves in ominous, fantastic forms against a sullen sky. The hot
land breeze changed to a cold wind which made me shiver. Suddenly the
mounting rampart of clouds, which seemed about to burst in a tempest,
was pierced by a hundred flaming lances coming from beyond the
horizon's rim. Before their onslaught the threatening cloud-wall
crumbled, faded, and abruptly dropped away to reveal the sun advancing
in all that brazen effrontery which it assumes in those lawless
latitudes along the Line. Now the sky was become a huge inverted bowl
of flawless azure porcelain, the surface of the Sulu Sea sparkled as
though strewn with a million diamonds, and, not a league off our bows,
rose the jungle-clothed shores of Borneo.

Scattered along the fringes of the world are certain places whose names
ring in the ears of youth like trumpet-calls. They are passwords to
romance and high adventure.