hips, and there was a faded pink space at her bows
under the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I made
out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian
passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came
no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere. All
about her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the low
sun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to a
smaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to a
homogeneous band of livid silver.

The double speed of the _Boreal_ and the other, hastening opposite ways,
must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was
accomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time I
crowded years of life. I was shouting passionately at her, my eyes
starting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone,
loud and urgent. For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign of
seeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, with
steadfast run. I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense of
relation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can only
remember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by the
fiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing high
and madly: for I was crying: 'Hi! Bravo! Why don't you stop? _Madmen! I
have been to the Pole!'_

That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most
detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware
of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past
me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She
was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for
offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks
piled thick with her festered dead.

In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-corner
caught the word _Yaroslav_, as I bent over the rail to retch and cough
and vomit at her. She was a horrid thing.

This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical or
sub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead: for all the bodies
which I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give out
a certain perfume of the peach. She was evidently one of those many
ships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yet
retained their old steam-funnels, &c.,