This to avoid being spoken. It
was tremendously essential that the _Glarus_ should not be spoken.
I suppose, no doubt, that it was the knowledge of our isolation that
impressed me with the dreadful remoteness of our position. Certainly the
sea in itself looks no different at a thousand than at a hundred miles
from shore. But as day after day I came out on deck at noon, after
ascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a reach of
empty paper), the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me with an
infinitely great awesomeness--and I was no new hand to the high seas
even then.
But at such times the _Glarus_ seemed to me to be threading a loneliness
beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate. Even in more
populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the horizon, the
propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing understood, and to an
unappreciated degree comforting. Here, however, I knew we were out, far
out in the desert. Never a keel for years upon years before us had
parted these waters; never a sail had bellied to these winds.
Perfunctorily, day in and day out we turned our eyes through long habit
toward the horizon. But we knew, before the look, that the searching
would be bootless. Forever and forever, under the pitiless sun and cold
blue sky stretched the indigo of the ocean floor. The ether between the
planets can be no less empty, no less void.
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