I turned my back, putting both my hands to my face in an ecstatic burst of gratitude to the great God of Heaven for this signal mercy. 'Twas what I had been hoping and waiting for, with a heart sickened by doubt and fear. The order was given, and had I been suddenly transported with Imogene into a ship bound for England my soul could not have swelled up with keener exultation! CHAPTER X. THE WEATHER HELPS MY SCHEME. I will say now that the alternate scheme I had all along had in my mind was escaping by means of one of the boats. But I had held this project back from Imogene; nay, had kept it in hiding almost away from my own consideration for fear that I should be unable to secure a boat. Perhaps, indeed, I had counted upon Vanderdecken practising the custom of his day, which was to get the boats over on coming to an anchor; yet it was but a hope, and not daring to think too heartily in this direction I had talked wholly to Imogene of delivering ourselves by floating and swimming ashore. But now the boats were to be lifted over the side, and my next proceeding must therefore be to watch an opportunity to enter one of them with Imogene and silently sneak away. To see what they were about, the men hung several lanterns about the waist and gangways. The canvas had been furled, and the yards lay in thick black strokes against the stars. The coast looked like peaked heights of pitch, and the sea, with a sort of dead gleaming floating in it with the motion of the folds, spread out brimful to the dim flashing of the surf. You could hear nothing for the noise of the pumping, yet it seemed to me but for that, God knows what mysterious whisperings, what faint noise of howling cries, what strange airy creeping of hisses and the seething of swept and disturbed foliage and burrowed bush I might catch the mingled echo of, hovering in a kind of cloud of sound, and coming, some of it, from as far away as the deeper blackness that you saw in the land where the cerulean giants of the afternoon steadied their burdened postures by pressing their brows against the sky. There was a red spot upon that part of the coast over which you would be looking for the crimson forehead of the moon presently. 'Twas a league off, and expressed a big area of incandescence, and was the fire whence the smoke I had noticed arose. One after the other they swung the boats clear of the rail to the water, and secured the ends of their painters, or the lines by which they were fastened, to a pin, on either quarter, thus leaving both boats floating under the counter. Vanderdecken then gave orders for the second anchor to be let go, the ship having some time since slided imperceptibly back to the fair tension of the cable already down.