144 On the trail of vanishing birds 



anguish in his voice. Herby, staring at McPhee with round eyes, 

 began moaning in a strange, piping sort of tone, thin and strained, 

 with an intelligible phrase only here and there. Most of it was, 

 "Sabe us, oh Lord above! God in Heaben, sabe us, sabe us!" The 

 rest was a repeated "Lord! Lord! Lord!" over and over again in a 

 low monotone. What McPhee had said was that the wind now 

 showed signs of swinging into a counterclockwise pattern. This 

 might be more than a gale, bad as that was; it could be a hurri- 

 cane! We now found the means for lashing ourselves to the craft 

 as best we could. 



At about this juncture we saw the first waterspout. There was 

 enough of a break overhead, a small thin spot, appearing sud- 

 denly and then gone again, to enable us to make out a towering 

 pillar of water close off our starboard beam. McPhee said he had 

 seen others trying to form; now here was one of the brutes nearly 

 alongside us. This first one slid on by, a great black mass of clouds 

 at its head, glowering like a mad thing, but there were many more 

 in its wake. I suppose that everyone who, in his lifetime, has spent 

 considerable time at sea gets to wondering if he will end in a 

 watery grave. I know that I thought then, "Yes, Ishmael, the same 

 fate may be thine." 



Toward morning we were still afloat, and McPhee, whose eyes 

 were phenomenal, picked out the flash of the Tower light at 

 Nassau, which can be seen at least 18 miles at sea. Somehow we 

 had made that distance. 



As it grew light we could see the angry water around us. And 

 the waterspouts. Not that we had a very good chance of avoiding 

 them, if it came to that. Like the lone Negro in the dismasted 

 sloop of Winslow Homer's water color, we could only stare 

 vacantly at disaster and hope that our luck held out. Through 

 the last hours of the night Herby had been singing hymns. There 

 was no stopping him. Being the type that goes on lengthy binges 

 and then, in his remorse, swears off the Demon Rum forever and 

 takes up with the church for a period, his repertoire was con- 

 siderable arid well memorized. McPhee and I had to put up with 

 it, along with the rest of our troubles. Once, during a lull, McPhee 

 leaned close to me, and with a laugh in his deep voice, said, 



