gain, from
left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would
startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering the
profound confidential warning: _You must not stare so, or it is over
with you!_' Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaning
over the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if some
instinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud: 'If you
look just yonder, _you will see...!_' I started, and in one instant had
surged up from all that depth of reverie to reality: I glanced to the
right: and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved,
rapidly moved: at last!--and it came to me.

That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortable
usual, a million-fold too intense for words--how sweetly consoling it
was! Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it--the rocky solidity,
the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live. From the day
when I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made me
swoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that other
beings like myself were alive on the earth with me: till now, suddenly,
I had the sweet indubitable proof: for on the south-western sea, not
four knots away, I saw a large, swift ship: and her bows, which were
sharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at a
pretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that went
wide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as she
ran the sea in haste, straight northward.

At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from a
shadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel one
frantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to the
bridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put a
foot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all the
mocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the cap
from my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-faced
maniac that I was: for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she was
flying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and I
did not know what she was flying those flags there for: and I was
embittered and driven mad.

With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in
that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow,
like many Russian s