’Now if a torpedo-boat with a City of Paris siren went mad and broke her moorings and hired a friend to help her, it’s just conceivable that we might be carried as we are now.  Otherwise this thing is——­’

The last words died on Keller’s lips, his eyes began to start from his head, and his jaw fell.  Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face.  It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man.  The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue—­as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth.  But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—­white, in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind.  Yet for all this the face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with rage and terror.  One long white feeler touched our bulwarks.  Then the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blindworm popping into its burrow, and the next thing that I remember is my own voice in my own ears, saying gravely to the mainmast, ’But the air-bladder ought to have been forced out of its mouth, you know.’

Keller came up to me, ashy white.  He put his hand into his pocket, took a cigar, bit it, dropped it, thrust his shaking thumb into his mouth and mumbled, ’The giant gooseberry and the raining frogs!  Gimme a light—­gimme a light!  Say, gimme a light.  A little bead of blood dropped from his thumb-joint.

I respected the motive, though the manifestation was absurd.  ’Stop, you’ll bite your thumb off,’ I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as he picked up his cigar.  Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks, seemed self-possessed.  He declared later that he was very sick.

‘We’ve seen it,’ he said, turning round.  ‘That is it.’

‘What?’ said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.

As he spoke the fog was blown into shreds, and we saw the sea, gray with mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life.  Then in one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment that the Bible speaks of.  From that wide-ringed trouble the Thing came up—­a gray and red Thing with a neck—­a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain.  Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of the ship’s name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as though they had been type badly set.  Then he said with a little cluck in his throat, ‘Ah me!  It is blind. Hur illa!  That thing is blind,’ and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain.  Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out.  The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles