he violent slam of a
furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious
things below had their breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high
hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
inaccessible serenity of the sky.

Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to
his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only
shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval
of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black
fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily
in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass, would
glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his
joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess
of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the
peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end
of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp
end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's
spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high
peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of
valorous deeds: he loved