Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Stone Ship by Vlban Hope Hodgson What real need have the imaginative for other worlds or distant epochs when we possess on our own Earth a vast area of unexplored and, despite all our boasted discoveries, still pretty much unexplorable territory. In this realm, which exceeds in mileage all the lands mapped by men, there exists heaven alone knows what beings, what natural powers and unsuspected possibilities. We refer, if youre still puzzled, to the world of the oceans, about whose bot- toms we Rnow scarcely more than we do of the craters of the moon—and which hold for us a far greater influence. William Hope Hodgson gives us in the strange account of “The Stone Ship” just a glimpse of the unplumbed world that girdles the lands we know. | UM things!—Of course there are rum things happen at sea—As rum as ever there were. I remember when I was in the Alfred Jessop, a small barque, whose owner was her skipper, we came across a most extraordinary thing. We were twenty days out from London, and well down into the tropics. It was before I took my ticket, and I was in the fo’cas’le. The day had passed without a breath of wind,-and the night found us with all the lower sails up in the buntlines. | Now, I want you to take good note of what I am going to say:— When it was dark in the second dog watch, there was not a sail in sight; not even the far off smoke of a steamer, and no land nearer than Africa, about a thousand miles to the eastward of us. It was our watch on deck from eight to twelve, midnight, and my look- out from eight to ten. For the first hour, I walked to and fro across the break of the fo’cas’le head, smoking my pipe and just listening to the quiet. ... Ever heard the kind of silence yéu can get away out at sea? You need to be in one of the old-time windjammers, with all the lights dowsed, and the sea as calm and quiet as some queer plain of death. And then you Want a pipe and the lonesomeness of the fo’cas’le head, with the caps’n to 87 i COMIGDOOKS (EC)