The Maplin watched us pass with its red eye.  We raised all the lights true and clear.  I went below, and we were talking of London, and the last trains, when the engine-room telegraph gave us a great shock.  “Stop her!” we heard the watch cry below.

I don’t know how we got on deck.  There were too many on the companion ladder at the same time.  While we were struggling upwards we heard that frantic bell ring often enough to drive the engine-room people distracted.  I got to the ship’s side in time to see a liner’s bulk glide by.  She would have been invisible but for her strata of lights.  She was just beyond our touch.  A figure on her, high over us, came to her rail, distinct in the blur of the light of a cabin behind him, and shouted at us.  I remember very well what he said, but it is forbidden to put down such words here.  The man at our wheel paid no attention to him, that danger being now past, and so of no importance.  He continued to spin the spokes desperately, because, though we could not see the ships about us, we could hear everywhere the alarm of their bells.  We had run at eleven knots into a bank of fog which seemed full of ships.  The moon was looking now over the top of the wall of fog, yet the Windhover, which, with engines reversed, seemed to be going ahead with frightful velocity, drove into an opacity in which there was nothing but the warning sounds of a great fear of us.  I imagined in the dark the loom of impending bodies, and straining overside in an effort to make them out, listening to the murmur of the stream, nervously fanned the fog with my hat in a ridiculous effort to clear it.  Twice across our bows perilous shadows arose, sprinkled with stars, yet by some luck they drifted silently by us, and the impact we expected and were braced for was not felt.

I don’t know how long it was before the Windhover lost way, but we anchored at last, and our own bell began to ring.  When our unseen neighbours heard the humming of our exhaust, their frantic appeal subsided, and only now and then they gave their bells a shaking, perhaps to find whether we answered from the same place.  There was an absolute silence at last, as though all had crept stealthily away, having left us, lost and solitary, in the fog.  We felt confident there would be a clearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation lights.  But the rampart of fog grew higher, veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the last and highest star.  We were imprisoned.  We lay till morning, and there was only the fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere which tolled dolefully.

And morning was but a weak infiltration into our prison.  A steadfast inspection was necessary to mark even the dead water overside.  The River was the same colour as the fog.  For a fortnight we had been without rest.  We had become used to a little home which was unstable, and sometimes delirious, and a sky that was always falling, and an earth that rose to meet the collapse.  Here we were on a dead level, still and silent, with the men whispering, and one felt inclined to reel with giddiness.  We were fixed to a dumb, unseen river of a world that was blind.