The captain whistled again, and far and far astern the invisible twin
steam-sirens answered us. Their blasting shriek grew louder, till at
last it seemed to tear out of the fog just above our quarter, and I
cowered while the _Rathmines_ plunged bows under on a double swell
that crossed.

'No more,' said Frithiof, 'it is not good any more. Let us get away,
in the name of God.'

'Now if a torpedo-boat with a _City of Paris_ siren went mad and
broke her moorings and hired a friend to help her, it's just
conceivable that we might be carried as we are now. Otherwise this
thing is----'

The last words died on Keller's lips, his eyes began to start from
his head, and his jaw fell. Some six or seven feet above the port
bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon,
hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for
it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open,
revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue--as absurd as the tongue of an
elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of
the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the
lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the
horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless--white,
in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the
face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture,
was alive with rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our
bulwarks. Then the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blindworm
popping into its burrow, and the next thing that I remember is my own
voice in my own ears, saying gravely to the mainmast, 'But the