, to keep me for a week if I
used it sparingly. He had said, with a grin, that I would be all right
for a week if the weather kept calm. If not, he was afraid I might be
inconvenienced. But he would like me to have a week, because that was
exactly the length of time that he had had. Those had been his last
words before he nodded and said, 'So long.'

"The whole of that day passed in a dead calm. I sat on the floor with my
arms clasped round my knees, because there wasn't room to stretch out my
legs, and when I became too cramped in that position I stood up, which I
could just manage to do if I stooped my head. Later on I found out that
I could stand upright by putting my head inside the bell, but I couldn't
bear that for very long because of the intolerable noise of the clappers
hitting the bell so near my ears. I tried holding the clappers still,
but that was no good, as there were four of them. So I held the bell
itself, which at least deadened the sound. No, I couldn't unhook the
clappers; they were a fixture. Anyhow, that first day I wasn't much
troubled by the noise of the bell, as the buoy rocked very slightly
on an oily swell; I was more troubled by the dazzle of the sun on the
water, not daring to shut my eyes for long lest I should miss a possible
ship, and also I was divided between the gnawing of my thoughts and
the boredom of those interminable hours from sunrise to sunset. I don't
suppose it is given to many men to have nothing better to do than watch
the sun travel across the heavens from the moment it emerges above one
horizon to the moment it dips below the rim of the other. That was what
I watched--the delicacy of dawn, the blood-red of sunset, and the grand
golden sweep of the journey in between the two.

"Never had I felt so abandoned or so insignificant. Can your imagination
enter into it at all? To do so, you must keep the sense of the enormous
circle of sea always present in your mind, the hard round edge of the
horizon, and the buoy in the centre like a speck of dust in the centre
of a plate. I felt I was in a tiny prison in the middle of an enormous
prison. And after the sun had gone it was worse; it is true that I
could no longer see that huge hard circle, but I knew that, although
invisible, it was still there, and now in addition I had a black vault
over me, and it grew cold, and a loneliness closed down on me such as I
had not experienced while I had the sun and his warmth for companions.
I