In every case I found below-decks
a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I took
into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a
forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two
knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their
islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of
them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquid
air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a
stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to
jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the
dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an
awful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I went
up again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There
being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that
half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset
me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and
sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the
ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.
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