, all unmindful of the future. The doctor
appeared not to see them, and dreamt on.

Every vestige of day had faded away. This was the moment when the child,
watching from the distant cliff, lost sight of the hooker. Up to then
his glance had remained fixed, and, as it were, leaning on the vessel.
What part had that look in fate? When the hooker was lost to sight in
the distance, and when the child could no longer see aught, the child
went north and the ship went south.

All were plunged in darkness.

CHAPTER VII.

SUPERHUMAN HORRORS.

On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on board
the hooker saw the hostile land recede and lessen behind them. By
degrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilight
Portland, Purbeck, Tineham, Kimmeridge, the Matravers, the long streaks
of dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses.

England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the
sea.

All at once night grew awful.

There was no longer extent nor space; the sky became blackness, and
closed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes
appeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in the
course of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in every
possibility.

It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar
waterspout makes its appearance.

A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and
in places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences
resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and
refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up
cones of foam on the sea.

The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet
it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.

In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not
a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent
back as if in fear.

Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the
same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is
sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at
the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out
in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her
head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid
being pooped or caught broadside