r aspects subtly. Toward evening they vanished as a rule.
But this day they awaited the setting sun, which glowed and smouldered
sulkily amongst them before it sank down. The punctual and wearisome
stars reappeared over our mastheads, but the air remained stagnant and
oppressive.

The unfailing Ransome lighted the binnaclelamps and glided, all shadowy,
up to me.

"Will you go down and try to eat something, sir?" he suggested.

His low voice startled me. I had been standing looking out over the
rail, saying nothing, feeling nothing, not even the weariness of my
limbs, overcome by the evil spell.

"Ransome," I asked abruptly, "how long have I been on deck? I am losing
the notion of time."

"Twelve days, sir," he said, "and it's just a fortnight since we left
the anchorage."

His equable voice sounded mournful somehow. He waited a bit, then added:
"It's the first time that it looks as if we were to have some rain."

I noticed then the broad shadow on the horizon, extinguishing the low
stars completely, while those overhead, when I looked up, seemed to
shine down on us through a veil of smoke.

How it got there, how it had crept up so high, I couldn't say. It had an
ominous appearance. The air did not stir. At a renewed invitation from
Ransome I did go down into the cabin to--in his own words--"try and eat
something." I don't know that the trial was very successful. I suppose
at that period I did exist on food in the usual way; but the memory is
now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a
sort of infernal stimulant exciting and consuming at the same time.

It's the only period of my life in which I attempted to keep a diary.
No, not the only one. Years later, in conditions of moral isolation, I
did put down on paper the thoughts and events of a score of days. But
this was the first time. I don't remember how it came about or how the
pocketbook and the pencil came into my hands. It's inconceivable that I
should have looked for them on purpose. I suppose they saved me from the
crazy trick of talking to myself.

Strangely enough, in both cases I took to that sort of thing in
circumstances in which I did not expect, in colloquial phrase, "to come
out of it." Neither could I expect the record to outlast me. This shows
that it was purely a personal need for intimate relief and not a call of
egotism.

Here I must give another sample of it, a few detached lines, now
looking very ghostly to my