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The night was warm and windless. A shaving of new moon had lately arisen; but it was still too small and too low down in heaven to contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries; and the rough face of the earth was drenched with starlight.
Two men had been swept overboard, as Roxton said one of them was Percivale but they had both got on board again, to drift, oarless, with the rest now in a windless valley now aloft on a tempest-swept hill of water away towards a goal they knew not, neither had chosen, and which yet they could by no means avoid.
For still longer hours we pushed through a windless calm by motor power. Showers fell incessantly. We lived in pajamas, barefooted, unshaven and unwashed. Fresh water was limited, as it would be impossible to replenish our casks for many weeks. McHenry said it was not difficult to accustom one's self to lack of water, both externally and internally.
But now from somewhere among the broken ground immediately in front of us there came one last despairing yell, and then a dull, heavy thud. We halted and listened. Not another sound broke the heavy silence of the windless night. I saw Holmes put his hand to his forehead like a man distracted. He stamped his feet upon the ground. "He has beaten us, Watson. We are too late." "No, no, surely not!"
They told me they were glad to make sixty cents a day, and if they were lucky the result might be two florins. We found ourselves in the midst of the vast jungles that cover Borneo, serving to keep the atmosphere cool and prevent air currents from ascending in these windless tropics. We were almost exactly on the equator, at an elevation of about 100 metres.
Temp. -17°. We have struggled out 4.6 miles in a short day over a really terrible surface it has been like pulling over desert sand, not the least glide in the world. If this goes on we shall have a bad time, but I sincerely trust it is only the result of this windless area close to the coast and that, as we are making steadily outwards, we shall shortly escape it.
He struck first a heavy blow on his inflated chest: and, throwing out horizontally a big arm that remained steady, extended in the air like the limb of a tree on a windless day "Not a pain or an ache there. Can you see this shake in the least?" His voice was low, in an awing, confident contrast with the headlong emphasis of his movements. He sat down abruptly.
And scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere.
The affairs of the world, drums and the torch of war, had passed for those hours from his knowledge, as at the centre of a cyclone there was a windless calm. To-morrow he knew he would pass out into the tumult again, and the minutes slipped like pearls from a string, dropping into the dim gulf where the tempest raged. . . .
They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personal illusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but an unapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them never suggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast that could be reached. It was a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over.
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