as all over. Was it
possible? All over, already?

In my anxiety to keep clear of the schooner which, for all I know to
this day, may not have been there at all, I had come too close to the
sand, so close that I heard soft, rapid footfalls stop short in the fog.
A voice seemed to be asking me in a whisper:

"Where, oh, where?"

Another cried out irresistibly, "I see it."

It was a subdued cry, as if hushed in sudden awe.

My arm swung to and fro; the turn of my wrist went on imparting the
propelling motion of the oar. All the rest of my body was gripped
helplessly in the dead expectation of the end, as if in the benumbing
seconds of a fall from a towering height. And it was swift, too. I felt
a draught at the back of my neck--a breath of wind. And instantly, as if
a battering-ram had been let swing past me at many layers of stretched
gauze, I beheld, through a tattered deep hole in the fog, a roaring
vision of flames, borne down and springing up again; a dance of purple
gleams on the strip of unveiled water, and three coal-black figures in
the light.

One of them stood high on lank black legs, with long black arms thrown
up stiffly above the black shape of a hat. The two others crouched low
on the very edge of the water, peering as if from an ambush.

The clearness of this vision was contained by a thick and fiery
atmosphere, into which a soft white rush and swirl of fog fell like a
sudden whirl of snow. It closed down and overwhelmed at once the tall
flutter of the flames, the black figures, the purple gleams playing
round my oar. The hot glare had struck my eyeballs once, and had melted
away again into the old, fiery stain on the mended fabric of the fog.
But the attitudes of the crouching men left no room for doubt that we
had been seen. I expected a sudden uplifting of voices on the shore,
answered by cries from the sea, and I screamed excitedly at Castro to
lay hold of his oar.

He did not stir, and after my shout, which must have fallen on the
scared ears with a weird and unearthly note, a profound silence attended
us--the silence of a superstitious fear. And, instead of howls, I heard,
before the boat had travelled its own short length, a voice that seemed
to be the voice of fear itself asking, "Did you hear that?" and a
trembling mutter of an invocation to all the saints. Then a strangled
throat trying to pronounce firmly, "The souls of the dead _Inglez_.
Crying from pain."

Admiral Rowley's seamen, s