got to say to you, sir!' growled he as he turned away; so I thought it no use to say more, and leant over the bulwarks, resolved to see it out. "The fact was, the farther we got off the land _now_, the worse, seeing that if what I dreaded should prove true, why, we were probably in thirty or forty fathoms of water, where no anchor could hold for ten minutes' time--if it ever caught ground. My way would have been to get every boat out at once, and tow in till you could see the colour of some shoal or other from aloft, then take my chance there to ride out whatever might come, to the last cable aboard of us. Accordingly I wasn't sorry to see that by this time the whole bight of the coast was slowly rising off our beam betwixt the high land far astern and the broad bluffs upon her starboard bow; which last came out already of a sandy reddish tint, and the lower part of a clear blue, as the sun got westward on our other side. What struck me was, that the face of the water, which was all over wrinkles and winding lines, with here and there a quick ripple, when I went below, had got on a sudden quite smooth as far as you could see, as if they'd sunk down like so many eels; a long uneasy ground-swell was beginning to heave in from seaward, on which the ship rose; once or twice I fancied I could observe the colour different away towards the land, like the muddy chocolate spreading out near a river-mouth at ebb-tide--then again it was green, rather; and as for the look of the coast, I had no knowledge of it. I thought again, certainly, of the old quartermaster's account in the _Iris_, but there was neither anything like it to be seen, nor any sign of a break in the coast at all, though high headlands enough. "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-rift, 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!'