Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/151

 The second day of it, in the evening, the old mutiny relic prattled to Beauling of England's green fields. And the same night the air stopped vitalizing his aged works, and of all that ship's company he was the first to reach home. They sank him quickly, with none to weep. The minister who read the sentences of committal looked, when he had done, like one recently drawn out of the water. People did not weep out of their eyes, but all over, like Niobe.

They made the canal at night, shipped a canal rudder, and steamed on slowly—a ship lost in a desert. The moon struck the sand with all the force of her imagination, paraded armies of monsters, created pinnacled cities, fashioned abandoned women of mountainous size who searched for their betrayers with ophthalmic eyes—an orchard of peach-trees in blossom, the gates of hell. She changed a peaceful village into millions of vermined gray apes that wrestled with vile contortions or became elusive, like a bank of rolling smoke. She whitened a jagged ridge