Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/392



more the ship's bells sounded musically over the waters. The moon came up, gleaming wanly like a pale yellow moth through the clouds of smoke pouring from the inverted funnel of the mountain. The whirling eddies of these black columns, the motion of the moon, which appeared to float against their dark tides, and—to those that could see them—her six white shadows, were the only evidences that Nature was not slumbering. All else was motionless. No silver lip of wavelet kissed the cutwater of the ship; her deck did not heave—it was quite as steady as when, the voyage ended, she would rest in drydock.

Calm was the air. The depth and fulness of its silence presaged many things, perhaps a quiet gathering of all her forces for some fatal spring.

Again those strange tingles titillated through the whole of Sally's body. So surcharged was the atmosphere that when she stretched her hand out, it was as if it touched some invisible steel, completing the circuit of a ghostly battery.

She looked aloft. The southern half of the heavens with its smoke and lost moon souls was like the fouled and 380