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In good time the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass.
Those idle tales with which the old credulous nurse had beguiled my infancy, tales of wonder, knight-errantry, and adventure, had left behind them seeds long latent, seeds that might never have sprung up above the soil, but that my boyhood was so early put under the burning-glass, and in the quick forcing house, of the London world.
A strange thing it is how all time will converge itself, as it were, into the burning-glass of a moment! There runs a popular superstition that it is thus, in the instant of death; that our whole existence crowds itself on the glazing eye a panorama of all we have done on earth just as the soul restores to the earth its garment.
Then the situation dawned upon him this reckless gentleman with the burning-glass was his cousin Jack. Mr. Rowlands made a memorandum of the punishment, and at the same time scribbled a few words in reply to Mr. Copland. As he did so, Valentine had an opportunity of examining his relative's appearance.
I told him what the Queen had done to encourage the growth of cotton on the Zambezi, and how we had been thwarted by slave-traders and their abettors: they were pleased with this. When asked I showed them my note-book, watch, compass, burning-glass, and was loudly drummed home. I showed them the Bible, and told them a little of its contents.
It would be as bad as that nightmare fancy which used to haunt her, of being dragged forward to find the ten thousand eyes of a crowded theater all focused upon her, a sensation almost as horrible as being under a burning-glass. "Oh no! not tonight. I would much rather not. Indeed, I can not sing."
On that day it has been customary in Catholic countries to extinguish all the lights in the churches, and then to make a new fire, sometimes with flint and steel, sometimes with a burning-glass. At this fire is lit the great Paschal or Easter candle, which is then used to rekindle all the extinguished lights in the church.
I could build my hut in the dusk, or even by the light of the fire, should it be necessary, after I had caught my fish. Then taking a handful of moss into the open, with a few dry sticks, I quickly lighted it with my burning-glass, and carrying it back, soon had my fire in a blaze. I next made it up carefully, that it might burn until I came back, and hurried down to the river.
"Now," he continued, "by filling the interior with water we shall have a powerful burning-glass, which will in a few seconds set fire to any inflammable substance, or burn a hole in our clothes."
There was a disagreeable odor of burned feathers in the air. Mechanically my eye fell on the sun-dial; there was a spot the size of a silver dollar on the side of the pedestal where the stone had crumbled and disintegrated, as though it had been placed at the focus of some immensely powerful burning-glass. I stepped behind the sun-dial and looked out to sea.
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