In the dim half light of the morning I stood by the skipper on the spray showered bridge, and with him through the dissolving darkness tried to pick out the harbor bearings of the port that was to be our Christmas refuge. The man had evidently been drinking during the night, as I gathered, and he was dense in mind and stupid beyond conception. The little engineer, who spoke English, joined us on the bridge, for all realized the general necessity of reaching port within a reasonable length of time, as our coal was running short. We had just about enough, as a matter of fact, to get back to Trebizond, but I had learned on the previous day that none was obtainable there, and hence we were relying on Batuum to replenish our bunkers. By eight o’clock the sky gave promise of a dreary day, and the barometer, with no uncertain index finger, was pointing to worse. In fact, it was creeping down perceptibly each hour, and already recorded the lowest figure that we had read on its ever cynical face since we had come to live in its sinister shadow. Breakfast, as usual, was out of the question, and anyway we were all eagerly searching the coast line for the harbor mouth that had brought us hence. A new snow during the night had turned the whole landscape white, and with the snowy mountain wall rising up sharply in the background, we could not discover a sign of anything that might be construed into a symptom of a port. Eight-thirty came at last, and the little engineer discovered a mountain elbow on our port bow which he emphatically stated that he knew, and knew well. In his opinion, we had overshot Batuum. The skipper was easily persuaded that this was the case, and so we put about, and with a redoubled watch crept back along the coast. An hour or more we cruised with our eager spyings, rewarded by not a sign which might betoken the longed for haven. In the meantime in the west the evergrowing cloud of black verified the fact that the barometer had not been working in the dark. I was eager enough to reach the harbor in the beginning, but with each minute that I watched that black mass grow and bulge against the western sky, my anxiety increased. I called the Chief and asked for an estimate as to how much coal we had remaining in our bunkers. He was gone fifteen minutes, and his troubled face confirmed my intuitions of uncertainties ahead. “Not as much coal as we had hoped,” he replied to my look rather than to any spoken word. “We have enough to last until this afternoon, and no doubt we will be in port ere that, unless—” and his bright little eyes swept the western heavens where the great relentless cloud was throwing its sable mantle across the sky.