Daylight found them in the boats, standing off to watch the last lurid scene. The ship burned fiercely throughout the forenoon. At midday, under a blistering sun, her bows seemed suddenly to crumple and dissolve; surrounded by a cloud of steam, she settled forward with a loud hissing noise, and slowly vanished under the waters of the China Sea. Captain Sheldon, sitting upright in the stern of the long-boat, watched the scene with set jaw and snapping eyes. It was his first disaster, the first time he had met destiny coming the other way. A fierce anger, like the fire he had just been fighting, ran in his blood. He was beside himself. It seemed inconceivable that there was no way to bring his ship back out of the deep; that the very means of authority had vanished, that he was powerless, that the event was sealed for all time. He wanted to strike out blindly, hit something, crush something. Well he knew that if any blame attached to the matter, it rested on him alone. For some occult reason, as it now seemed, the mate a few days before had broached the subject of fire, in conversation at the supper table. Not that fire was to be expected; no one ever had heard of it with such a cargo. Why had the mate chosen that day, of all others, when the captain had lost his patience with old Wang, to talk about fire throughout the supper period, to follow him on deck with the subject in the evening? The talk had only aroused the perversity of his own opposition. The mate, waxing eloquent and imaginative, had at length succeeded in frightening himself; had wanted to take off the fore hatch in the dog watch, just to look into the hold. Had he done so then, the fire would probably have been discovered in season to overcome it. But Captain Sheldon, sarcastic and bristling with arbitrariness, had flatly commanded him to leave the fore hatch alone. Well, no use in crying over spilt milk. The ship was gone. "Give way!" he shouted across the water to the mate’s boat "Keep along with me. We’ll strike in for the coast, and follow it down" All the afternoon they rowed silently in the broiling heat and mirror-like calm. The coast of China came in sight, a range of high blue-grey mountains far inland. Nearer at hand, a group of outlying islands appeared on the horizon. Captain Sheldon swung his course to the westward, heading directly into the blinding sun that by this time had sunk low in the western sky. In the extreme bow of the longboat sat the old steward, gazing straight ahead with unseeing eyes. His head was uncovered; the sun beat down on him without effect. He made no movement, uttered no sound. Alone and helpless, he suffered the throes of the most desperate struggle that human consciousness affords—the struggle of the will against the call of a body habituated to opium.