Later still, I saw that our dark skylight was beginning to regain its sight.  Light was coming through.  Our lunatic saloon lamp was growing wan.  I ventured on deck.  When my face was no more than out of the hatch, what I saw was our ship’s stern upturned before me, with our boat lashed to it.  It dropped out of view instantly, and exposed the blurred apparition of a hill in pursuit of us—­the hill ran in to run over us—­and in that very moment of crisis the slope of wet deck appeared again, and the lashed boat.  The cold iron was wet and slippery, but I grasped it firmly, as though that were an essential condition of existence in such a place.

The Windhover, too, looked so small.  She was diminished.  She did not bear herself as buoyantly as yesterday.  Often she was not quick enough to escape a blow.  She looked a forlorn trifle, and there was no aid in sight.  I cannot say those hills, alive and deliberate on all sides, were waves.  They were the sea.  The dawn astern was a narrow band of dead white, an effort at daybreak suddenly frustrated by night, but not altogether expunged.  The separating black waters bulked above the dawn in regular upheavals, shutting out its pallor, and as incontinently collapsed again to release it to make the Windhover plainer in her solitude.

The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood beside me.  He put his nose inside the galley.  “I smell coffee,” he said.  His charge reared, and pitched him against the bulwarks.  “Whoa, you bitch,” he cried cheerfully.  “Our fleet ought not to be far off,” he explained.  “Ought to see something of them soon.”  He glanced casually round the emptinesss of the dawn.  He might have been looking for some one with whom he had made an appointment at Charing Cross.  He then backed into the hatch and went below.  The big mate appeared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashed spar, did not give the sunrise so much as a glance, did not allow the ocean to see that he was even aware of its existence, but went forward to the bridge.

The clouds lowered during the morning, and through that narrowed space between the sea and the sky the wind was forced at a greater pace, dragging rain over the waters.  Our fleet might have been half a mile away, and we could have gone on, still looking for it.  The day early surrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had made its brief existence a failure.  It had nearly gone when we sighted another trawler.  She was the Susie.  She was smaller than the Windhover.  We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep in the wash on her deck.  It would not be easy to forget the Susie.  I shall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shout through his hands at her.  She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her.  Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted clear.  She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan of her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us.  Her men bawled to us.  They said the Susie had sighted nothing.