air-bladder ought to have been forced out of its mouth, you know.'

Keller came up to me, ashy white. He put his hand into his pocket,
took a cigar, bit it, dropped it, thrust his shaking thumb into his
mouth and mumbled, 'The giant gooseberry and the raining frogs! Gimme
a light--gimme a light! Say, gimme a light. A little bead of blood
dropped from his thumb-joint.

I respected the motive, though the manifestation was absurd. 'Stop,
you'll bite your thumb off,' I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as
he picked up his cigar. Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks,
seemed self-possessed. He declared later that he was very sick.

'We've seen it,' he said, turning round. 'That is it.'

'What?' said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.

As he spoke the fog was blown into shreds, and we saw the sea, gray
with mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life. Then in
one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment that the
Bible speaks of. From that wide-ringed trouble the Thing came up--a
gray and red Thing with a neck--a Thing that bellowed and writhed in
pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of
the ship's name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as
though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck
in his throat, 'Ah me! It is blind. _Hur illa_! That thing is blind,'
and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the
thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and
cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray
ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back,