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Updated: June 20, 2025
He thought of the time when he had passed that way on the outward voyage, poor and unknown, and had watched the last island of his native land sink below the sea-rim. Much had happened since then and now that he had at last come home, what life awaited him there?
The night was bright with the light of shining stars, and the sea, although the breeze was brisk, was smooth as a mountain lake, only the rip, ripy rip of the barque's cutwater and the bubbling sounds of her eddying wake broke the silence of the night. Ten miles away the verdure-clad peaks and spurs of lofty Bougainville stood clearly out, silhouetted against the sea-rim on the starboard hand.
Then the sun dipped below the sea-rim, and the blue Pacific was shrouded in darkness. "Why in thunder couldn't the dunderhead put a bomb into that fish before it came on dark?" growled the skipper to his other officers, as they sat down to a harried sapper in the spacious, old-fashioned cabin of the whaler. No one answered.
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke the sea-rim. The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of the world. The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted.
Overhead the vault of heaven was unflecked by a single cloud, though far away on the eastern sea-rim a faintly curling bank gave promise of a breeze before the sun rose much higher. At a signal from Oliver the second mate pulled up, and he, Harvey, and the chief mate again held a brief consultation.
Astern of the schooner the sun was slowly descending to the western sea-rim, and as the course was resumed after picking up Dolores, the Point and the cliff gradually drew out across the path of the sun, until the outlines of the rock and trees stood out black and sharp.
As I sat on the mat-covered canoe, moody yet feverish, the first squall of rain came sweeping shoreward from the darkened sea-rim, and in a few minutes my burning skin was drenched and cooled from head to foot.
It is a keen, frosty morning in June the midwinter of Australia and as the red sun bursts through the sea-rim, a gentle land breeze creeps softly down from the mountain forest of gums and iron-barks, and blows away the mists that, all through a night of cloudless calm, have laid heavily upon the surface of the sleeping ocean.
The stars set: the summer evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of Fomalhaut: though there is a long slope between the zenith Now and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time we cannot recall or refashion.
He knew well enough the meaning of one chance in a million, and was calmly certain that his wife and he had entered upon their last few living hours hours that were inevitably bound to be black and terrible with tragedy. The tropic sun rose in a cloudless sky. Nothing was to be seen. The Samoset was beyond the sea-rim.
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