ferment--that makes some men think holy
thoughts, and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see
him. That is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of
the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness
that it is alive. And--bah! To-morrow I shall pay for it as the
drunkard pays. And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely,
cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the
sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and
movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin
and scale and the guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne
is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a
tasteless drink."

He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with the
weight and softness of a tiger. The _Ghost_ ploughed on her way. I
noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to
it the effect of Wolf Larsen's swift rush from sublime exultation to
despair slowly left me. Then some deep-water sailor, from the waist of
the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the "Song of the Trade Wind":

"Oh, I am the wind the seamen love--
I am steady, and strong, and true;
They follow my track by the clouds above,
O'er the fathomless tropic blue.

* * * * *

Through daylight and dark I follow the bark
I keep like a hound on her trail;
I'm strongest at noon, yet under the moon,
I stiffen the bunt of her sail."

CHAPTER VIII

Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his
strange moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a great man, a
genius who has never arrived. And, finally, I am convinced that he is
the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or
generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of
civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced
type. Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no congeniality
between him and the rest of the men aboard ship. His tremendous virility
and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him,
even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or else
he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in
their menta