The Boreal’s bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me, and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, I saw two people.  The shore there is some three feet above the water, and edged with boulders of rock, about which grows a fringe of shrubs and small trees:  behind this fringe is a path, curving upward through a sombre wooded little gorge; and on the path, near the water, I saw a driver of one of those Norwegian sulkies that were called karjolers:  he, on the high front seat, was dead, lying sideways and backwards, with low head resting on the wheel; and on a trunk strapped to a frame on the axle behind was a boy, his head, too, resting sideways on the wheel, near the other’s; and the little pony was dead, pitched forward on its head and fore-knees, tilting the shafts downward; and some distance from them on the water floated an empty skiff.

* * * * *

When I turned the next fore-land, I all at once began to see a number of craft, which increased as I advanced, most of them small boats, with some schooners, sloops, and larger craft, the majority a-ground:  and suddenly now I was conscious that, mingling with that delicious odour of spring-blossoms—­profoundly modifying, yet not destroying it—­was another odour, wafted to me on the wings of the very faint land-breeze:  and ‘Man,’ I said, ‘is decomposing’:  for I knew it well:  it was the odour of human corruption.

* * * * *

The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quite steep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water to their last cloudy crag:  and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay, and a modest, homely old town.

Not a sound, not one:  only the languidly-working engines of the Boreal.  Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and his scythe mown.

I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an empty boat that lay at the ship’s side when she stopped; and I paddled twenty yards toward the little quay.  There was a brigantine with all her courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails, and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops:  and the sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent, an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality—­the inner mind and meaning of Azrael—­than aught that I could have conceived:  for all, as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.