Mr Snelling was the only one that ventured to pass a joke; when Jones, who I thought was out of hearing, looked at the reefer with such a fierce glance, and so scornful at the same time, that I couldn't help connecting what happened the very next moment with it--for without the slightest warning, both of us were flung to leeward, and Snelling pitched into the scuppers, as a huge rolling ridge of the white water came down upon our beam; while the schooner broached to in the wind, floundering on the swell with her sails aback. Had the breeze been stronger, I think it would have fairly swamped us with the sternway she had; and heave after heave swelled glaring and weltering out of the pale blind sky, till our decks swam with light in the dusk under the bulwarks, and about the dark mouths of the hatchways. Just as suddenly the rollers seemed to sink in the smooth of the sea, and at last we payed off with the breeze as before, at the cost of a good fright and a famous ducking. Two or three times in the course of the middle watch did this happen, except that we were taken less by surprise, and had the hatches closed, with every rope ready to let go; the breeze strengthening all the time, and the same sort of look continuing all round and aloft.[25]
About four o'clock or so, the appearance of the sky near where the horizon ought to be, right ahead, struck Westwood and me as stranger than ever; owing to a long lump of shadow, as it were, lying northward like the shape of a bow or the round back of a fish miles long, though it softened off at one end into the hollow of the air, and the gleam of the white water broke past the other like the streaks of the northern lights in a frosty night toward the Pole, save for the thin shadowy tint of it, and the stars shining plainly through. I'd have fancied it was high land; when suddenly the half-moon was seen to ooze like a yellow spot out of the shapeless sort of steam to eastward, like a thing nobody knew, shedding a faint brown glimmer far below where you hadn't seen there was water at all. The bank of shadow softened away towards her, till in little more than five minutes the dark rippling line of the sea was made out, drawn across the dusk as if it had been the wide mouth of a frith in the polar ice, opening far on our weather-bow. A soft blue shimmering tint stole out on it by contrast, leaving the milk-white glare still spread everywhere else, astern, ahead, and on our lee-beam, into the sightless sky: 'twas the old blue water we caught sight of once more, with the natural night and the stars hanging over it; and the look-out aloft reported blue water stretching wide off to the nor'ard. There was one full hurrah from the seamen in the bows, and they ran of themselves naturally enough to the ropes, standing by to haul the schooner on a wind--to head up for the old salt sea, no doubt.