Our bell
rang the hours, but no caller ever rang it. There were no guests to
dinner, no telegrams, no insistent telephone jangles invading our
privacy. We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and
there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time in
learning what was happening to our fifteen hundred million other
fellow-creatures.
But it was not dull. The affairs of our little world had to be
regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered
in its journey through space. Also, there were cosmic disturbances
to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth
in its frictionless orbit through the windless void. And we never
knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next. There
were spice and variety enough and to spare. Thus, at four in the
morning, I relieve Hermann at the wheel.
"East-northeast," he gives me the course. "She's eight points off,
but she ain't steering."
Small wonder. The vessel does not exist that can be steered in so
absolute a calm.
"I had a breeze a little while ago - maybe it will come back again,"
Hermann says hopefully, ere he starts forward to the cabin and his
bunk.
The mizzen is in and fast furled. In the night, what of the roll
and the absence of wind, it had made life too hideous to be
permitted to go on rasping at the mast, smashing at the tackles, and
buffeting the empty air into hollow outbursts of sound. But the big
mainsail is still on, and the staysail, jib, and flying-jib are
snapping and slashing at their sheets with every roll. Every star
is out. Just for luck I put the wheel hard over in the opposite
direction to which it had been left by Hermann, and I lean back and
gaze up at the stars. There is nothing else for me to do. There is
nothing to be done with a sailing vessel rolling in a stark calm.
Then I feel a fan on my cheek, faint, so faint, that I can just
sense it ere it is gone. But another comes, and another, until a
real and just perceptible breeze is blowing. How the Snark's sails
manage to feel it is beyond me, but feel it they do, as she does as
well, for the compass card begins slowly to revolve in the binnacle.
In reality, it is not revolving at all. It is held by terrestrial
magnetism in one place, and it is the Snark that is revolving,
pivoted upon that delicate cardboard device that floats in a closed
vessel of alcohol.
So the Snark comes back on her course. The breath increases to a
tiny puff. The Snark feels the weight of it and actually heels over
a trifle.
