For so long as I had kept at sea, and a good many different latitudes I had been into--yet I must say I never in my life before saw such a strange sight as broke on us the instant we put our heads out of the booby-hatch, fresh from the lamp-light in the cabin. Indeed, I can't but own to my first feeling being fright; for what it was I couldn't understand, unless we were got into a quarter of the world where things weren't natural. There were a few stray clouds in the sky, scattered away ahead, and clearing eastward to settle along before the breeze; all aloft of us, high over the sharp dark edge of the sails and gaffs, the air seemed to open away out pale and glimmering like a reflection in the ice; all round you caught a glimpse of the stars weakening and weakening toward the horizon. But the water itself--that was the sight that bewildered one! On every side the whole sea lay spread out smooth, and as white as snow--you couldn't fancy how wide it might stretch away astern or on our lee-beam, for not a mark of horizon was to be seen, save on the northwest, where you made it out, owing to the sky there being actually darker than the sea--but all the time the wide face of it was of a dead ghastly paleness, washing with a swell like milk to our black counter as we forged ahead. It wasn't that it shone in the least like blue water at night in the ordinary tropics--by Jove! that would have been a comfort--but you'd have thought there was a winding-sheet laid over all, or we were standing across a level country covered with snow--only when I stood up, and watched the bows, there was a faint hissing sparkle to be seen in the ripple's edge, that first brought me to myself. The Lascars had woke up where they lay about the caboose, and were cowering together for sheer terror; the men standing, each one in his place, and looking; while Jones, who had relieved the midshipman, leant by himself with his head on the capstan, as if to keep out the sight of it all: the schooner's whole dusky length, in fact, with every black figure on her decks, and her shape up to the lightest stick or rope of her aloft, appearing strange enough, in the midst of the broad white glare, to daunt any one that wasn't acquainted with the thing. "Mr Jones," said I quickly, on going up to him, "what the devil is this? I'll be hanged if I didn't begin to believe in witchcraft or something. Where are we getting to?" "Nothing, nothing, sir," said he, lifting his head; "'tis natural enough; only the milk sea, as they call it--the white water, sir, that comes down twice a-year hereabouts from God knows where--you only see it so at--at _night_!" "Oh, then, according to that," I said, "we shan't be long of sighting your island. I suppose?" "No," said he, "if the breeze freshens at all, keeping our present course, the mast-head ought to hail it in two or three hours; but God knows, Lieutenant Collins, natural though the sight is, there's something a man can't get rid of,