The ship might have been about twelve or fourteen miles from the north-east point upon her starboard bow, a high rocky range of bluffs,--and rather less from the nearest of what lay away off her beam,--but after this you could mark nothing more, except it were that she edged farther from the point, by the way its bearings shifted or got blurred together: either she stood still, or she'd caught some eddy or under-drift, and the mate walked about quite lively once more. The matter was, how to breathe, or bear your clothes--when all of a sudden I heard the second mate sing out from the forecastle--"Stand by the braces, there! Look out for the topes'l hawl-yairds!" He came shuffling aft next moment as fast as his foundered old shanks could carry him, and told Mr Finch there was a squall coming off the land. The mate sprang up on the bulwarks, and so did I--catching a glance from him as much as to say--There's your gale from seaward, you pretentious lubber! The lowest streak of coast bore at present before our starboard quarter, betwixt east and south-east'ard, with some pretty high land running away up from it, and a sort of dim blue haze hanging beyond, as 'twere. Just as Macleod spoke, I could see a dusky dark vapour thickening and spreading in the haze, till it rose black along the flat, out of the sky behind it; whitened and then darkened again, like a heavy smoke floating up into the air. All was confusion on deck for a minute or two--off went all the awnings--and every hand was ready at his station, fisting the ropes; when I looked again at the cloud, then at the mates, then at it again. "_By_ George!" said I, noticing a pale wreath of it go curling on the pale clear sky over it, as if to a puff of air,--"it _is_ smoke! Some niggers, as they so often do, burning the bush!" So it was; and as soon as Finch gave in, all hands quietly coiled up the ropes. It was scarce five minutes after, that Jacobs, who was coiling up a rope beside me, gave me a quiet touch with one finger--"Mr Collins, sir," said he in a low voice, looking almost right up, high over toward the ship's larboard bow, which he couldn't have done before, for the awnings so lately above us,--"look, sir--there's an _ox-eye_!" I followed his gaze, but it wasn't for a few seconds that I found what it pointed to, in the hot far-off-like blue dimness of the sky overhead, compared with the white glare of which to westward our canvass aloft was but dirty gray and yellow.