he captain
reached the point of deciding to return, when one night the voice of Ned
Land was heard calling:

"Look out there! The thing we are looking for on our weather-beam!"

At this cry the entire crew rushed towards the harpooner--captain,
officers, masters, sailors, and cabin-boys; even the engineers left
their engines, and the stokers their furnaces. The frigate was now
moving only by her own momentum, for the engines had been stopped.

My heart beat violently. I was sure the harpooner's eyes had not
deceived him. Soon we could all see, about two cables' length away, a
strange and luminous object, lying some fathoms below the surface, just
as described in many of the reports. One of the officers suggested that
it was merely an enormous mass of phosphorous particles, but I replied
with conviction that the light was electric. And even as I spoke the
strange thing began to move towards us!

The captain immediately reversed engines and put on full speed, but the
luminous monster gained on us and played round the frigate with
frightful rapidity. Its light would go out suddenly and reappear again
on the other side of the vessel. It was clearly too great a risk to
attack the thing in the dark, and by midnight it disappeared, dying out
like a huge glow-worm. It appeared again, about five miles to the
windward, at two in the morning, coming up to the surface as if to
breathe, and it seemed as though the air rushed into its huge lungs like
steam in the vast cylinders of a 2,000 horse-power engine.

"Hum!" said I. "A whale with the strength of a cavalry regiment would be
a pretty whale!"

_II.--The Attack and After_

Everything was in readiness to attack with the coming of the dawn, and
Ned Land was calmly sharpening his great harpoon, but by six in the
morning the thing had again disappeared, and a thick sea-fog made it
impossible to observe its further movements. At eight o'clock, however,
the mist had begun to clear, and then, as suddenly as on the night
before, Ned Land's voice was heard calling: "The thing on the
port-quarter!"

There it was, surely enough, a mile and a half away, now a large black
body showing above the waves, and leaving a track of dazzling white as
its great tail beat the water into foam.

Moving rapidly, it approached within twenty feet of the frigate. Ned
stood ready at the bow to hurl his harpoon, and the monster was now
shining again with that strange light which dazzled our eyes.