XXIX.

In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece of crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling numbers of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal conditions would have remained invisible, sails down under the horizon.  It is the malicious pleasure of the East Wind to augment the power of your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see better the perfect humiliation, the hopeless character of your captivity.  Easterly weather is generally clear, and that is all that can be said for it—­almost supernaturally clear when it likes; but whatever its mood, there is something uncanny in its nature.  Its duplicity is such that it will deceive a scientific instrument.  No barometer will give warning of an easterly gale, were it ever so wet.  It would be an unjust and ungrateful thing to say that a barometer is a stupid contrivance.  It is simply that the wiles of the East Wind are too much for its fundamental honesty.  After years and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship’s cabin bulkhead will, almost invariably, be induced to rise by the diabolic ingenuity of the Easterly weather, just at the moment when the Easterly weather, discarding its methods of hard, dry, impassive cruelty, contemplates drowning what is left of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and horrid rain.  The sleet-and-hail squalls following the lightning at the end of a westerly gale are cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel enough.  But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to rain poisoned showers upon your head.  It is a sort of steady, persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes your heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings.  And the stormy mood of the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing blackness.  The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist and spray before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the narrow seas, when he has mustered his courage and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your eyes out, puts them out completely, makes you feel blind for life upon a lee-shore.  It is the wind, also, that brings snow.

Out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding sheet upon the ships of the sea.  He has more manners of villainy, and no more conscience than an Italian prince of the seventeenth century.  His weapon is a dagger carried under a black cloak when he goes out on his unlawful enterprises.  The mere hint of his approach fills with dread every craft that swims the sea, from fishing-smacks to four-masted ships that recognise the sway of the West Wind.  Even in his most accommodating mood he inspires a dread of treachery.  I have heard upwards of ten score of windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night, filling the Downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn hurriedly out of the ground at the first breath of his approach.  Fortunately, his heart often fails him:  he does not always blow home upon our exposed coast; he has not the fearless temper of his Westerly brother.