Bligh’s eyes were lidded, as if in contemplation of his inner ecstasy.  His head was thrown back, and his brows worked up and down tormentedly.  His wide mouth remained open as his hymn was suddenly interrupted on the long-drawn note.  From somewhere in the shimmering mists the note was taken up, and there drummed and rang and reverberated through the strait a windy, hoarse, and dismal bellow, alarming and sustained.  A tremor rang through Bligh.  Moving like a sightless man, he stumbled forward from the head of the quarter-deck steps, and Abel Keeling was aware of his gaunt figure behind him, taller for the steepness of the deck.  As that vast empty sound died away, Bligh laughed in his mania.

“Lord, hath the grave’s wide mouth a tongue to praise Thee?  Lo, again—­”

Again the cavernous sound possessed the air, louder and nearer.  Through it came another sound, a slow throb, throb—­throb, throb—­Again the sounds ceased.

“Even Leviathan lifteth up his voice in praise!” Bligh sobbed.

Abel Keeling did not raise his head.  There had returned to him the memory of that day when, before the morning mists had lifted from the strait, he had emptied the pipkin of the water that was the allowance until night should fall again.  During that agony of thirst he had seen shapes and heard sounds with other than his mortal eyes and ears, and even in the moments that had alternated with his lightness, when he had known these to be hallucinations, they had come again.  He had heard the bells on a Sunday in his own Kentish home, the calling of children at play, the unconcerned singing of men at their daily labour, and the laughter and gossip of the women as they had spread the linen on the hedge or distributed bread upon the platters.  These voices had rung in his brain, interrupted now and then by the groans of Bligh and of two other men who had been alive then.  Some of the voices he had heard had been silent on earth this many a long year, but Abel Keeling, thirst-tortured, had heard them, even as he was now hearing that vacant moaning with the intermittent throbbing that filled the strait with alarm....

“Praise Him, praise Him, praise Him!” Bligh was calling deliriously.

Then a bell seemed to sound in Abel Keeling’s ears, and, as if something in the mechanism of his brain had slipped, another picture rose in his fancy—­the scene when the Mary of the Tower had put out, to a bravery of swinging bells and shrill fifes and valiant trumpets.  She had not been a leper-white galleon then.  The scroll-work on her prow had twinkled with gilding; her belfry and stern-galleries and elaborate lanterns had flashed in the sun with gold; and her fighting-tops and the war-pavesse about her waist had been gay with painted coats and scutcheons.  To her sails had been stitched gaudy ramping lions of scarlet saye, and from her mainyard, now dipping in the water, had hung the broad two-tailed pennant with the Virgin and Child embroidered upon it....