* * * * *

Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whose passing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate.  During four days I had seen not one sign of present life on the Norway coast, only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark; and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering the profound confidential warning:  You must not stare so, or it is over with you!’ Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaning over the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if some instinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud:  ’If you look just yonder, you will see...!’ I started, and in one instant had surged up from all that depth of reverie to reality:  I glanced to the right:  and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved, rapidly moved:  at last!—­and it came to me.

That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortable usual, a million-fold too intense for words—­how sweetly consoling it was!  Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it—­the rocky solidity, the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live.  From the day when I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made me swoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that other beings like myself were alive on the earth with me:  till now, suddenly, I had the sweet indubitable proof:  for on the south-western sea, not four knots away, I saw a large, swift ship:  and her bows, which were sharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at a pretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that went wide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as she ran the sea in haste, straight northward.

At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from a shadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel one frantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to the bridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put a foot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all the mocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the cap from my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-faced maniac that I was:  for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she was flying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and I did not know what she was flying those flags there for:  and I was embittered and driven mad.