There was one movement.  It was that of the leisurely motes of the fog.  We watched them—­there was nothing else to do—­for a change of wind.  A change did not seem likely, for the rigging was hoar with frost, and ice glazed our deck.

Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few feet.  It was a cruel deception to play on the impatient.  A mere cork, a tiny dark object like that, drifting along some distance out, would make a focal point in the fog, and would give the illusion of a clearance.  Once, parading the deck as the man on watch, giving an occasional shake to the bell, I went suddenly happy with the certainty that I was now to be the harbinger of good tidings to those below playing cards.  A vague elevated line appeared to starboard.  I watched it grow into definition, a coast showing through a haze that was now dissolving.  Up they all tumbled at my shout.  They stared at the wonder hopefully and silently.  The coast became higher and darker, and the skipper was turning to give orders—­and then our hope turned into a wide path on the ebbing River made by cinders moving out on the tide.  The cinders passed.  We re-entered our silent tomb.  There had been no sign of our many neighbours of the night before, but suddenly we heard some dreadful moans, the tentative efforts of a body surprised by pain, and these sounds shaped, hilariously lachrymose, into a steam hooter playing “Auld Lang Syne,” and then “Home, Sweet Home.”  There followed an astonishing amount of laughter from a hidden audience.  The prisoners in the neighbouring cells were there after all, and were even jolly.  The day thereafter was mute, the yellow walls at evening deepened to ochre, to umber, and became black, except where our riding lights made luminous circles.  Each miserable watcher who came down to the saloon that night, muffled and sparkling with frost, to get a drink of hot coffee, just drank it, and went on deck again without a word.

The motes next morning went drifting leisurely on the same light air, interminable.  Our prison appeared even narrower.  Then once again a clearance was imagined.  Our skipper thought he saw a lane along the River, and up-anchored.  The noise of our cable awoke a tumult of startled bells.

Ours was a perishable cargo.  We were much overdue.  Our skipper was willing to take any risk—­what a good master mariner would call a reasonable risk—­to get home; and so, when a deck hand, on the third morning, with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, appeared in the saloon with the news that it was clearing a little, the master decided he would go.

I then saw, from the deck of the Windhover, so strange a vision that it could not be related to this lower sphere of ours.  It could be thought that dawn’s bluish twilight radiated from the Windhover.  We were the luminary, and our faint aura revealed, through the melting veil, an outer world that had no sky, no plane, no bounds.  It was void.  There was no River, except that small oval of glass on which rested our ship, like a model.