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For miles round fierce flashes of lightning rent the vapor, and at a distance of fully forty miles ghostly corposants gleamed on the rigging of a vessel. These phenomena grew more and more alarming until August 27th, when four explosions of fearful intensity shook earth and sea and air, the third being "far the most violent and productive of the most widespread results."
"Whatever can it possibly be?" queried Harry; "I have never seen anything like it before." "I suspect," returned Roger, "that it is in some way connected with the approaching storm. I have heard sailors speak of those lights as witch-lights, death-gleams, and corposants, and their appearance is said always to foretell disaster.
They also were undoubtedly corposants glimmering from the spars of the strange sail of which he was in pursuit, and which, from her present proximity, must have been steering to the eastward, and consequently toward him, instead of to the westward and away from him, as he had feared.
Presently a bright star suddenly appears under the faintly gleaming corposants. It is a ship's lantern held up over the rail. A minute later a tiny spark appears close to the lantern, immediately bursting into a keen bluish glare from which a cloud of white smoke arises and flakes of blue-white flame drop now and then as a port-fire is burnt.
The clouds settle right down onto the mast-head, black and thick, like the settlin's of an ink-bottle; the lightnin' hisses an' cuts fore and aft; and corposants come flightin' down onto the boom or the top, gret balls o' light; and the wind roars louder than the seas; and the rain comes down in spouts, it don't fall fur enough to drop; you'd think heaven and earth was come together, with hell betwixt 'em; and then it'll all clear up as quiet and calm as a Simsbury Sunday; and you wouldn't know it could be squally, if 'twan't for the sail that you hadn't had a chance to furl was drove to ribbons, and here an' there a stout spar snapped like a cornstalk, or the bulwarks stove by a heavy sea.
Blyth believed she certainly could not be more than a mile distant, his conviction being that the feeble, sickly lights of the ghostly corposants could not penetrate further than that distance in so thick an atmosphere, and it now became of the utmost importance nay, it might even be a matter of life or death for him to reach the stranger before the hurricane should burst upon them.
I had never seen such a thing before, but I had often heard of it, and I recognised our strange visitors at once as corposants, or "lamps of Saint Elmo," as they are called by the seamen of the Mediterranean; though our own sailors call them by the less dignified name of "Davy Jones' lanterns." "What d'ye think of bein' boarded by the likes of that?" again queried Bob, in a hoarse whisper.
On one occasion, during an electrical storm off New Guinea, a number of corposants appeared on the yards of his vessel, which was manned by Polynesians and some Portuguese. One of the latter was so terrified at the ghastly corpo santo that he fell on his knees and held a small leaden crucifix, which he wore on his neck, to his lips.
When at last we reluctantly desisted from our efforts, and were in the act of securing the lifebuoys once more, Bob cast his eyes aloft, and called my attention to the fact that the corposants had disappeared. "Depend on't, Harry," quoth he, "them lanterns didn't come aboard of us for nothing.
Presently another and similar luminous ball gleamed into shape at the mast-head, swaying and wavering about the end of the spar like its companion. They were corposants, and whilst they conveyed to the skipper the only additional warning needed of the impending elemental strife, they also at once explained the mystery of the lights to leeward for which he was steering.
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