He stayed a long time, the last one still on deck—and yet he had a sense, a feeling, that he was not alone. The awareness was so powerful he could not put it into his own words but jotted down something he remembered from H. G. Wells—a similar experience deep in the night, in fleeting, lonely moments: “I experience a sort of communion of myself with something great that is not myself.” The same sense consumed McKinlay for so long that when he finally looked away, he realized that he’d forgotten to put his fur gloves back on when he quit sketching, and he hurried below to find the fingers on
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