the _Spirito Santo_ caught up with the south-west trades. Once again she made the seas roar past her, for now, regardless of her depth in the water, Elderkin made all the sail he could. Day after day slipped past with the slipping foam, and the gaunt creatures aboard felt a stirring of relief. And then, in the Doldrums, they ran into a dead calm. . . . Only anyone who has been becalmed on a tropical sea knows the terror that it is. Of all feelings of helplessness it is probably the most acute. Without steam or motor a ship is as powerless as though she were anchored to the sea-bottom with iron cables. Men have gone mad of it, and men did go mad of it in the starving _Spirito Santo_. She lay, as famished for a breeze as they for bread, upon a surface of molten glass, her sails limp as a dead bird's wing, the pitch soft in her seams, and the only sound in the circle of the horizon the faint creak-creak of her yards against the masts. Cabins and forecastle were unbearable, yet on deck the vertical sun had driven all but the thinnest lines of shadow out of being. The nights were almost as hot as the days and always the false cross gleamed from a cloudless sky, and the true Cross swam up lying on her back and trailing the pointers behind her, slowly righting herself as she rose and driving the pitiless brilliancy of the Milky Way before her. The drinking-water, what there was of it, stank; and the dried mouths of the men could hardly manage the mouldy hard-tack which captain and crew shared alike. And there was nothing to be done, nothing that could be done. The men were past revolt now, they could only shamble dizzily about. There was nothing to be done--except pray, and Elderkin prayed, though his lips moved almost soundlessly. He thought much these days, and he remembered--probably because of the dead stillness around--an old seafaring fable that in the calm heart of a cyclone life is to be found--that there birds and butterflies of every size and colour crowd, till the air is hung with brightness. He saw the individual soul of man as the hollow calm in the midst of life, cut off by the circling storm from all other air, and told himself that it could be the refuge for beauties of praise . . . he strove to make this aching solitude of mind wherein he was, rich as the fabled heart of the cyclone. . . . Then, just as the first faint breath made her ripple the water at her bows, he discovered that, worn out by her successive batterings, the _Spirito Santo_ was literally falling apart. He looked over her side and saw that she was spewing oakum from her seams, while she settled lower and lower in the water.