water in
the ocean makes a great difference. His very desire, unconquered, but
exiled, had left the place where he could constantly hear its voice. He
saw it, he saw himself, the past, the future, he saw it all, shifting
and indistinct like those shapes the strained eye of a wanderer outlines
in darker strokes upon the face of the night.

X

When Lingard went to his boat to follow Carter, who had gone back to the
yacht, Wasub, mast and sail on shoulder, preceded him down the ladder.
The old man leaped in smartly and busied himself in getting the dinghy
ready for his commander.

In that little boat Lingard was accustomed to traverse the Shallows
alone. She had a short mast and a lug-sail, carried two easily, floated
in a few inches of water. In her he was independent of a crew, and, if
the wind failed, could make his way with a pair of sculls taking short
cuts over shoal places. There were so many islets and sandbanks that in
case of sudden bad weather there was always a lee to be found, and when
he wished to land he could pull her up a beach, striding ahead, painter
in hand, like a giant child dragging a toy boat. When the brig was
anchored within the Shallows it was in her that he visited the lagoon.
Once, when caught by a sudden freshening of the sea-breeze, he had waded
up a shelving bank carrying her on his head and for two days they had
rested together on the sand, while around them the shallow waters raged
lividly, and across three miles of foam the brig would time after time
dissolve in the mist and re-appear distinct, nodding her tall spars that
seemed to touch a weeping sky of lamentable greyness.

Whenever he came into the lagoon tugging with bare arms, Jorgenson,
who would be watching the entrance of the creek ever since a muffled
detonation of a gun to seaward had warned him of the brig's arrival on
the Shore of Refuge, would mutter to himself--"Here's Tom coming in his
nutshell." And indeed she was in shape somewhat like half a nutshell and
also in the colour of her dark varnished planks. The man's shoulders and
head rose high above her gunwales; loaded with Lingard's heavy frame she
would climb sturdily the steep ridges, slide squatting into the hollows
of the sea, or, now and then, take a sedate leap over a short wave. Her
behaviour had a stout trustworthiness about it, and she reminded one of
a surefooted mountain-pony carrying over difficult ground a rider much
bigger than himself.

Wasub wip