And so fair was the world about them, too:  the brightest suavest autumn weather; all the still air aromatic with that vernal perfume of peach:  yet not so utterly still, but if I passed close to the lee of any floating thing, the spicy stirrings of morning or evening wafted me faint puffs of the odour of mortality over-ripe for the grave.

So abominable and accursed did this become to me, such a plague and a hissing, vague as was the offence, that I began to shun rather than seek the ships, and also I now dropped my twelve, whom I had kept to be my companions all the way from the Far North, one by one, into the sea:  for now I had definitely passed into a zone of settled warmth.

I was convinced, however, that the poison, whatever it might be, had some embalming, or antiseptic, effect upon the bodies:  at Aadheim, Bergen and Stavanger, for instance, where the temperature permitted me to go without a jacket, only the merest hints and whiffs of the processes of dissolution had troubled me.

* * * * *

Very benign, I say, and pleasant to see, was sky and sea during all that voyage:  but it was at sun-set that my sense of the wondrously beautiful was roused and excited, in spite of that great burden which I carried.  Certainly, I never saw sun-sets resembling those, nor could have conceived of aught so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched:  for the whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies, warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies.  But many evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, I believe, over the world, after the eruption of the volcano of Krakatoa.

And whereas I had before said to myself:  ’If now a wave from the Deep has washed over this planetary ship of earth...,’ I said now:  ’A wave—­but not from the Deep:  a wave rather which she had reserved, and has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...’

* * * * *

I had some knowledge of Morse telegraphy, and of the manipulation of tape-machines, telegraphic typing-machines, and the ordinary wireless transmitter and coherer, as of most little things of that sort which came within the outskirts of the interest of a man of science; I had collaborated with Professor Stanistreet in the production of a text-book called ‘Applications of Science to the Arts,’ which had brought us some notoriety; and, on the whole, the minutiae of modern things were still pretty fresh in my memory.  I could therefore have wired from Bergen or Stavanger, supposing the batteries not run down, to somewhere:  but I would not:  I was so afraid; afraid lest for ever from nowhere should come one answering click, or flash, or stirring....