s finished, and
were waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level in
a new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them.
There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superior
gravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there was
in this new system in another sky. Above them there was nothing, and
around them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of space. Their
lights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shining
mooring lines.

It was all so silent, too. But our incoming cable shattered the spell,
and when our siren warned them that we were moving, a wild pealing
commenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend. There
were eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargo
steamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern. More
than once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her
while he could make out a ship ahead of us. We drifted stern first on
the flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till a
boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend. And was there
any one for the shore?

There was. I took no more risks. I had been looking for that life-boat.
And what a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under one's feet
again. There were naphtha flares in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways,
and houses that kept to one place. There was a public-house, too.
Outside that place I remembered the taste of everlasting fried fish, and
condensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected the
recollection with a glass of port--several glasses, to make sure of
it--and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in a
dream. Besides, this was Christmas Eve.

XI. An Old Lloyd's Register

With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era
that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was
inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander. He was
unravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks," as he
called his ship. He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of
the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he
illustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his own
experiences in the Heligoland Bight. These, to me, were like the
bedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot.
The cu