h humanity,
had hitherto sustained them, and they felt that, though alone on the
vast expanse of waters, they were in companionship with others of their
kind, and that the perils one man had passed might be successfully dared
by another. But now--with one ship growing smaller behind them, and the
other, containing they knew not what horror of human agony and human
helplessness, lying a burning wreck in the black distance ahead of
them--they began to feel their own littleness. The Malabar, that huge
sea monster, in whose capacious belly so many human creatures lived and
suffered, had dwindled to a walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how
infinitely small had their own frail cockboat appeared as they shot out
from under her towering stern! Then the black hull rising above them,
had seemed a tower of strength, built to defy the utmost violence of
wind and wave; now it was but a slip of wood floating--on an unknown
depth of black, fathomless water. The blue light, which, at its first
flashing over the ocean, had made the very stars pale their lustre, and
lighted up with ghastly radiance the enormous vault of heaven, was now
only a point, brilliant and distinct it is true, but which by its very
brilliance dwarfed the ship into insignificance. The Malabar lay on
the water like a glow-worm on a floating leaf, and the glare of the
signal-fire made no more impression on the darkness than the candle
carried by a solitary miner would have made on the abyss of a coal-pit.

And yet the Malabar held two hundred creatures like themselves!

The water over which the boats glided was black and smooth, rising into
huge foamless billows, the more terrible because they were silent. When
the sea hisses, it speaks, and speech breaks the spell of terror; when
it is inert, heaving noiselessly, it is dumb, and seems to brood over
mischief. The ocean in a calm is like a sulky giant; one dreads that it
may be meditating evil. Moreover, an angry sea looks less vast in extent
than a calm one. Its mounting waves bring the horizon nearer, and
one does not discern how for many leagues the pitiless billows repeat
themselves. To appreciate the hideous vastness of the ocean one must see
it when it sleeps.

The great sky uprose from this silent sea without a cloud. The stars
hung low in its expanse, burning in a violent mist of lower ether. The
heavens were emptied of sound, and each dip of the oars was re-echoed in
space by a succession of subtle harmo