A chill comes over me. It isn’t the moon playing with a cloud, but something uncanny I don’t know about. Could it be the white arch of Cape Horn, that terrifying thing Slocum mentions, the sign of a big gale? The stars shine with a hard glint and the sea looks menacing beneath the icy moon. A second spire rises next to the first. Then a third. Soon there are a dozen, like a huge bouquet of super-natural light. And now I understand . . . it is an aurora australia, the first I have ever seen, perhaps this voyage’s most precious gift to me.
