as if all at once the air had become too thick to budge; even the slight hiss of the water on her stem died out.  The narrow, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple, seemed to approach the shoal water of the bar by stealth.  The plunge of the lead with the mournful, mechanical cry of the lascar came at longer and longer intervals; and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their breath.  The Malay at the helm looked fixedly at the compass card, the Captain and the Serang stared at the coast.

Massy had left the skylight, and, walking flat-footed, had returned softly to the very spot on the bridge he had occupied before.  A slow, lingering grin exposed his set of big white teeth:  they gleamed evenly in the shade of the awning like the keyboard of a piano in a dusky room.

At last, pretending to talk to himself in excessive astonishment, he said not very loud—­

“Stop the engines now.  What next, I wonder?”

He waited, stooping from the shoulders, his head bowed, his glance oblique.  Then raising his voice a shade—­

“If I dared make an absurd remark I would say that you haven’t the stomach to . . .”

But a yelling spirit of excitement, like some frantic soul wandering unsuspected in the vast stillness of the coast, had seized upon the body of the lascar at the lead.  The languid monotony of his sing-song changed to a swift, sharp clamor.  The weight flew after a single whir, the line whistled, splash followed splash in haste.  The water had shoaled, and the man, instead of the drowsy tale of fathoms, was calling out the soundings in feet.

“Fifteen feet.  Fifteen, fifteen!  Fourteen, fourteen . . .”

Captain Whalley lowered the arm holding the glasses.  It descended slowly as if by its own weight; no other part of his towering body stirred; and the swift cries with their eager warning note passed him by as though he had been deaf.

Massy, very still, and turning an attentive ear, had fastened his eyes upon the silvery, close-cropped back of the steady old head.  The ship herself seemed to be arrested but for the gradual decrease of depth under her keel.

“Thirteen feet . . .  Thirteen!  Twelve!” cried the leadsman anxiously below the bridge.  And suddenly the barefooted Serang stepped away noiselessly to steal a glance over the side.

Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy of fourteen.  There was a childlike impulsiveness in the curiosity with which he watched the spread of the voluminous, yellowish convolutions rolling up from below to the surface of the blue water like massive clouds driving slowly upwards on the unfathomable sky.  He was not startled at the sight in the least.  It was not doubt, but the certitude that the keel of the Sofala must be stirring the mud now, which made him peep over the side.