t a picture of the map of this part of the world
before my mind's eye, and fell to an earnest consideration of it, but
could recollect of no land hereabouts, unless indeed we had been wildly
wrong in our reckoning aboard the brig, and I in the boat had been
driven four or five times the distance I had calculated--things not to
be entertained.

Yet even as a mere break in the frightful and enduring continuity of the
sea-line--even as something that was not sea nor sky nor the cold silent
and mocking illusion of clouds--it took a character of blessedness in my
eyes; my gaze hung upon it joyously, and my heart swelled with a new
impulse of life in my breast. It would be strange, I thought, if on
approaching it something to promise me deliverance from this dreadful
situation did not offer itself--some whaler or trader at anchor, signs
of habitation and of the presence of men, nay, even a single hut to
serve as a refuge from the pitiless cold, the stormy waters, the black,
lonely, delirious watches of the night, till help should heave into view
with the white canvas of a ship.

I put the boat's head before the wind, and steered with one hand whilst
I got some breakfast with the other. I thanked God for the brightness of
the day and for the sight of that strange white line of land, that went
in glimmering blobs of faintness to the trembling horizon where the
southern end of it died out. The swell rose full and brimming ahead,
rolling in sapphire hills out of the north-east, as I have said, whence
I inferred that that extremity of the land did not extend very much
further than I could see it, otherwise there could not have been so much
weight of water as I found in the heaving.

The breeze blew lightly and was the weaker for my running before it; but
the little line of froth that slipped past either side the boat gave me
to know that the speed would not be less than four miles in the hour;
and as I reckoned the land to be but a few leagues distant, I calculated
upon being ashore some little while before sundown.

In this way two hours passed. By this time the features of the coast
were tolerably distinct. Yet I was puzzled. There was a peculiar sheen
all about the irregular sky-line; a kind of pearly whitening, as it
were, of the heavens beyond, like to the effect produced by the rising
of a very delicate soft mist melting from a mountain's brow into the
air. This dismayed me. Still I cried to myself, 'It must be land! All