still we rocked
gently, and there was no wind.

"It's no square" Wolf Larsen said. "Old Mother Nature's going to get up
on her hind legs and howl for all that's in her, and it'll keep us
jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our boats. You'd better run up
and loosen the topsails."

"But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?" I asked, a
note of protest in my voice.

"Why we've got to make the best of the first of it and run down to our
boats before our canvas is ripped out of us. After that I don't give a
rap what happens. The sticks 'll stand it, and you and I will have to,
though we've plenty cut out for us."

Still the calm continued. We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious meal for
me with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the bulge of the earth,
and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of clouds moving slowly down
upon us. Wolf Larsen did not seem affected, however; though I noticed,
when we returned to the deck, a slight twitching of the nostrils, a
perceptible quickness of movement. His face was stern, the lines of it
had grown hard, and yet in his eyes--blue, clear blue this day--there was
a strange brilliancy, a bright scintillating light. It struck me that he
was joyous, in a ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an
impending struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge that
one of the great moments of living, when the tide of life surges up in
flood, was upon him.

Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud,
mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm. I see him yet standing
there like a pigmy out of the _Arabian Nights_ before the huge front of
some malignant genie. He was daring destiny, and he was unafraid.

He walked to the galley. "Cooky, by the time you've finished pots and
pans you'll be wanted on deck. Stand ready for a call."

"Hump," he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent upon
him, "this beats whisky and is where your Omar misses. I think he only
half lived after all."

The western half of the sky had by now grown murky. The sun had dimmed
and faded out of sight. It was two in the afternoon, and a ghostly
twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon
us. In this purplish light Wolf Larsen's face glowed and glowed, and to
my excited fancy he appeared encircled by a halo. We lay in the midst of
an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens