you there,
men?" my eyes made out shadow forms starting up around me, very few,
very indistinct; and a voice spoke: "All here, sir." Another amended
anxiously:

"All that are any good for anything, sir."

Both voices were very quiet and unringing; without any special character
of readiness or discouragement. Very matter-of-fact voices.

"We must try to haul this mainsail close up," I said.

The shadows swayed away from me without a word. Those men were the
ghosts of themselves, and their weight on a rope could be no more than
the weight of a bunch of ghosts. Indeed, if ever a sail was hauled up
by sheer spiritual strength it must have been that sail, for, properly
speaking, there was not muscle enough for the task in the whole ship let
alone the miserable lot of us on deck. Of course, I took the lead in the
work myself. They wandered feebly after me from rope to rope, stumbling
and panting. They toiled like Titans. We were half-an-hour at it at
least, and all the time the black universe made no sound. When the last
leech-line was made fast, my eyes, accustomed to the darkness, made
out the shapes of exhausted men drooping over the rails, collapsed on
hatches. One hung over the after-capstan, sobbing for breath, and I
stood amongst them like a tower of strength, impervious to disease and
feeling only the sickness of my soul. I waited for some time fighting
against the weight of my sins, against my sense of unworthiness, and
then I said:

"Now, men, we'll go aft and square the mainyard. That's about all we can
do for the ship; and for the rest she must take her chance."

VI

As we all went up it occurred to me that there ought to be a man at the
helm. I raised my voice not much above a whisper, and, noiselessly, an
uncomplaining spirit in a fever-wasted body appeared in the light aft,
the head with hollow eyes illuminated against the blackness which had
swallowed up our world--and the universe. The bared forearm extended
over the upper spokes seemed to shine with a light of its own.

I murmured to that luminous appearance:

"Keep the helm right amidships."

It answered in a tone of patient suffering:

"Right amidships, sir."

Then I descended to the quarter-deck. It was impossible to tell
whence the blow would come. To look round the ship was to look into a
bottomless, black pit. The eye lost itself in inconceivable depths.

I wanted to ascertain whether the ropes had been picked up off the
deck. O