these dreams and the success of his imaginary
achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its
hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,
they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away
with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded
confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so
pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes
ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black
line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.

The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his
thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor
running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and
with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake,
the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung
his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a
revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation
of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the
air that fills our lungs.

The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond
the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
the half-transparent dome covering t