. . .
Ought a fellow, Roddy, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, to complain
while he has these three stand-by's--a woman to love, a man to
admire, and a man to hate?"
"The engineer died just before dawn. Indeed, the day broke of a
sudden as I finished straightening his body and wrapping it for
burial; and I looked up in the new light, and around me, to take in
that second gush of loneliness of which I told you. . . . It was
appalling. It swept in on me from the whole enormous circumference
of empty waters, and I fairly cowered from it over the corpse I had
been tending.
"I never had that sensation again, or in anything like that degree,
during the whole voyage; and I shall presently tell you why. But it
was Macnaughten who taught me my first deliverance. . . . I knelt
there, huddled, not daring to turn my face up for a second look and
expose my cowardice. I seemed to be drowning in the deep of deeps,
and fragments of the first chapter of Genesis swirled past me like
straws--_And the earth was without form and void. . . . And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
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