sky; for there seemed to be another typhoon threatening, and he was
keenly anxious to run out of the storm area before the hurricane should
break. When twilight fell that evening, the sun was already enveloped
in a peculiar, dun-coloured mist that resembled an enormous pall of
distant smoke, in the midst of which the orb appeared like a dimly-seen,
red-hot iron disk, as it sank toward the western horizon. The darkening
sky overhead and away to the eastward glowed with a dull incandescence,
like the reflected glare of an enormous furnace; while the short, choppy
waves of the forenoon had given place to a long, oily, sluggish swell,
without a single ripple to disturb its surface, through which the _Chih'
Yuen's_ stem clove its way like a knife shearing through butter. The
ship was rolling heavily; and in the queer, eerie stillness that fell
with the disappearance of the sun, the usual ship-board sounds, the
clank of machinery far below, and even the voices of the men, assumed so
weird and unnatural a character that Frobisher felt himself gradually
being overcome by a most unpleasant, dismal sense of foreboding.

The sea, reflecting the ruddy glow from overhead, looked ghastly in the
extreme, recalling to the Englishman's disturbed fancy the old sailor's
legend of the appearance of the "Hand of Satan in the Sea of Darkness".
This was precisely the kind of sea out of which such a terrible
apparition might be expected to appear; and so strongly did the feeling
of menace take hold of him, that he actually caught himself at times
glancing apprehensively over his shoulder, in spite of his resolve to
the contrary.

About an hour after sunset, puffs of hot wind came moaning about the
ship from all directions, oppressive, and almost as noxious as the fumes
from an open furnace door. Indeed, there was a distinctly sulphurous
smell in the atmosphere; and the air was so full of electricity that a
quite perceptible shock was to be felt if the bare hand were placed on
metal, especially upon the copper fittings of the binnacle. A feeling
of vague uneasiness seemed to have taken possession of every man on
board; and tempers were short almost to the point of acerbity. The
petty officers could be heard snarling at the men, the officers grumbled
at their subordinates, and even Frobisher and Drake had something of a
passage of arms up on the bridge, until they realised that their fretted
nerves were due to the extraordinary weather c