The universe, which that morning had only begun to form in the void, was grouped about us.  This was the original of mornings.  We were its gravitational point.  It was inert and voiceless.  It was pregnant with unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms.  Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another life.  Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the dawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition.  The Windhover alone was substantial and definite.  But placed about us, suspended in a night that was growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have been ships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailers without substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that had left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, and were waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level in a new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them.  There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superior gravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there was in this new system in another sky.  Above them there was nothing, and around them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of space.  Their lights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shining mooring lines.

It was all so silent, too.  But our incoming cable shattered the spell, and when our siren warned them that we were moving, a wild pealing commenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend.  There were eight miles of ships:  barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargo steamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern.  More than once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her while he could make out a ship ahead of us.  We drifted stern first on the flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till a boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend.  And was there any one for the shore?

There was.  I took no more risks.  I had been looking for that life-boat.  And what a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under one’s feet again.  There were naphtha flares in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways, and houses that kept to one place.  There was a public-house, too.  Outside that place I remembered the taste of everlasting fried fish, and condensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected the recollection with a glass of port—­several glasses, to make sure of it—­and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in a dream.  Besides, this was Christmas Eve.

XI.  An Old Lloyd’s Register