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He stood up and swept the horizon carefully, shading his eyes with his hand; there was nothing but a mist at the horizon. He was alone with the sun, the sky, and the Lake. He could not surely have sailed into the ocean without knowing it? He sat down, dipped his hand overboard and tasted the drops that adhered; the water was pure and sweet, warm from the summer sunshine.

Then formed two camps: on one side the exalted spirits, sufferers, all the expansive souls who yearned toward the infinite, bowed their heads and wept; they wrapped themselves in unhealthful dreams and nothing could be seen but broken reeds in an ocean of bitterness.

The infinitely microscopic chance that each of us had for life cannot be approximated. All the drops of water in the ocean, or all the grains of sand upon the shore, or all the leaves on all the trees, if converted into numbers and used as a denominator, with one for a numerator, could hardly tell the fraction of a chance that gave us life.

They had crossed the frozen ocean and were coming to land again a land no more solid than the sea. Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and there, through valleys, ran the streams of bright blue. "Look!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and to their left loomed a strange formation of jutting vertical columns, covered with the white burden of snow.

All the desolate landscape, hesitating like some hovering ocean between the old pattern and the new, seemed to hang suspended amid the desolation of the winter skies. Everything roared. It seemed the ground shook.

To be sure he was sorry for Claudia; and he proved it by consenting, at a great sacrifice of his personal interests, to cross the ocean and go to her assistance. But he had faith in the doctrine that "Ever the right comes uppermost"; and he believed that she would be delivered from her troubles.

The man of mark and of adventure, on the contrary, resembles, in the course of his life, the river whose mid-current and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from each other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers which its fountains first reflected; violent changes of time, of place, and of circumstances, hurry him forward from one scene to another, and his adventures will usually be found only connected with each other because they have happened to the same individual.

As Newton had foreseen, the ebb-tide was soon over; a short pause of "slack water" ensued, and there was an evident and rapid increase of the water around him; the wind too freshened, and the surface of the ocean was in strong ripples. As the water deepened, so did the waves increase in size: every moment added to his despair.

The day had been very hot, and as the fierce yellow sun blazed westward into the tumbling blue of the sailless ocean, a girl came out from the thick undergrowth fringing the weather-bank of the island, and, walking quietly over the loose slabs of coral covering the shore, made her way towards a narrow channel through which the flowing tide was swiftly sweeping.

At the end of that time the two men could converse quite easily. One night, as they were sitting within the cabin before retiring, Tarzan turned to D'Arnot. "Where is America?" he said. D'Arnot pointed toward the northwest. "Many thousands of miles across the ocean," he replied. "Why?" "I am going there." D'Arnot shook his head. "It is impossible, my friend," he said.