inch the gods allow you.  You will need that and more very often before evening.  Now, as I put my head out I saw that I could not yet start, for there was a thick white mist over everything, so that I could not even see the bowsprit of my own boat.  Everything was damp:  the decks smelt of fog, and from the shore came sounds whose cause I could not see.  Looking over the iron bulwarks of the big English cargo ship, alongside of which I was moored, was a man with his head upon his folded arms.  He told me that he thought the fog would lift; and so I waited, seeking no more sleep, but sitting up there in the drifting fog, and taking pleasure in a bugle call which the French call “La Diane,” and which they play to wake the soldiers.  But in summer it wakes nobody, for all the world is waking long before.

Towards six the mist blew clean away before a little air from the north-east; it had come sharp over those miles and miles of sand dunes and flats which stretched away from Gris-nez on to Denmark.  From Gris-nez all the way to the Sound there is no other hill; but coarse grass, wind-swept and flying sand.  Finding this wind, I very quickly set sail, and as I did not know the harbour I let down the peak of the mainsail that she might sail slowly, and crept along close to the eastern pier, for fear that when I got to the open work the westerly tide should drive me against the western pier; but there was no need for all this caution, since the tide was not yet making strongly.  Yet was I wise to beware, for if you give the strange gods of the sea one little chance they will take a hundred, and drown you for their pleasure.  And sailing, if you sail in all weathers, is a perpetual game of skill against them, the heartiest and most hazardous game in the world.

So then, when I had got well outside, I found what is called “a lump.”  The sea was jumbling up and down irregularly, as though great animals had just stopped fighting there.  But whatever was the cause of it, this lump made it difficult to manage the boat I was in, for the air was still light and somewhat unsteady; sometimes within a point of north, and then again dropping and rising free within a point of east:  on the whole, north-east.  To windward the sea was very clear, but down towards the land there was a haze, and when I got to the black buoy which is three miles from Calais, and marks the place where you should turn to go into the harbour, I could barely see the high land glooming through the weather, and Calais belfry and lighthouse tower I could not see at all.  I looked at my watch and saw it was seven, and immediately afterwards the wind became steady and true, and somewhat stronger, and work began.

She would point very nearly north, and so I laid her for that course, though that would have taken me right outside the Goodwins, for I knew that the tide was making westerly down the Channel, ebbing away faster and faster, and that, like a man crossing a rapid river in a ferry-boat, I had to point up far above where I wanted to land, which was at Dover, the nearest harbour.  I sailed her, therefore, I say, as close as she would lie, and the wind rose.