OFF CAPE TRAFALGAR
December 18
We paced the bridge together, chatting till his watch should be done. The dim, uneasy outline of the steamer’s bows loomed before us; now and again we could feel her pulse quicken, her sinews tighten, as, like a living thing, she flinched from each lashing of the waves.
He was telling me tales of the yellow fever at Rio de Janeiro, of the crowd of vessels lying in the harbour without a soul on board, of six weeks he had spent in the hospital there, where twelve hundred fever-stricken creatures lay packed on the floor of a single ward, and the doctors dared only shout to the patients from behind a railed gangway.
And, while he still talked, up from the East crept the first flicker of the dawn, revealing flocks of ruddy-sailed smacks tossing off the Spanish shore; then, slowly, the throng of black billows turned to reddish-green, and across the sky, from behind the African coast, poured a deep, blood-red stain. The mirage rose, lifting into space the low line of black hills, and the growing glow set a carpet of cloud ablaze, till it hung, stretched across the sky, like a vast awning of beaten, burnished copper.