He himself had fallen into a kind of tranced felicity, in which
these questions no longer had other than an ingenious interest.
His heart was drowned in the engulfing blue. As they made their
southing, wind and weather seemed to fall astern, the sun poured
with a more golden candour. He stood at the wheel in a tranquil
reverie, blithely steering toward some bright belly of cloud that
had caught his fancy. Mr. Pointer shook his head when he glanced
surreptitiously at the steering recorder, a device that noted
graphically every movement of the rudder with a view to promoting
economical helmsmanship. Indeed Gissing's course, as logged on
the chart, surprised even himself, so that he forbade the
officers taking their noon observations. When Mr. Pointer said
something about isobars, the staff-captain replied serenely that
he did not expect to find any polar bears in these latitudes.

He had hoped privately for an occasional pirate, and scanned the
sea-rim sharply for suspicious topsails. But the ocean, as he
remarked, is not crowded. They proceeded, day after day, in a
solitary wideness of unblemished colour. The ship, travelling
always in the centre of this infinite disk, seemed strangely
identified with his own itinerant spirit, watchful at the gist of
things, alert at the point which was necessarily, for him, the
nub of all existence. He wandered about the pomerania~s sagely
ordered passages and found her more and more magical. She went on
and on, with some strange urgent vitality of her own. Through the
fiddleys on the boat deck came a hot oily breath and the steady
drumming of her burning heart. From outer to hawse-hole, from
shaft-tunnel to crow's-nest, he explored and loved her. In the
whole of her proud, faithful, obedient fabric he divined honour