‘What’s that?’ asked Logan, leaping up and looking towards Cagayan Sulu.

‘The Berbalangs,’ said Bude coolly.  ’You are wearing the ring I gave you?’

‘Yes, always do,’ said Logan, looking at his hand.

‘All the men have their pearls; I saw to that,’ said Bude.

‘Why, the noise is dwindling,’ said Logan.  ’That is odd; it seemed to be coming this way.’

‘So it is,’ said Bude; ’the nearer they approach the less you hear them.  When they have come on board you won’t hear them at all.’

Logan stared, but asked no more questions.

The musical boom as it approached had died to a whisper, and then had fallen into perfect silence.  At the very moment when the mysterious sound ceased, a swarm of things like red fire-flies, a host of floating specks of ruby light, invaded the deck in a cluster.  The red points then scattered, approached each man on board, and paused when within a yard of his head or breast.  Then they vanished.  A queer kind of chill ran down Logan’s spine; then the faint whispered musical moan tingled in each man’s ears, and the sounds as they departed eastwards gathered volume and force till, in a moment, there fell perfect stillness.

Stillness, broken only by a sudden and mysterious chorus of animal cries from the George Washington.  A kind of wail, high, shrieking, strenuous, ending in a noise as of air escaping from a pipe; a torrent of barks such as no known beast could utter, subsiding into moans that chilled the blood; a guttural scream, broken by heavy sounds as if of water lapping on a rock at uncertain intervals; a human cry, human words, with unfamiliar vowel sounds, soon slipping into quiet—­these were among the horrors that assailed the ears of the voyagers in the Pendragon.  Such a discord of laments has not tingled to the indifferent stars since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, and the Mammoth.

‘What a row in the menagerie!’ said Logan.

He was not answered.

Bude had fallen into a deck-chair, his face buried in his hands, his arms rocking convulsively.

‘I say, old cock, pull yourself together,’ said Logan, and rushing down the companion stairs, he reappeared with a bottle of champagne.  To extract the cork (how familiar, how reassuring, sounded the cloop!), and to pour the foaming beverage into two long tumblers, was, to the active Logan, the work of a moment.  Shaking Bude, he offered him the beaker; the earl drained it at a draught.  He shuddered, but rose to his feet.

‘Not a man alive on that doomed vessel,’ he was saying, when anew the still air was rent by the raucous notes of a megalophone: 

‘Is your exhibit all right?’