There was but an unfathomable gulf beyond the glass.

He stood up on the couch, and drawing the curtains behind his head to shut out the light, he once more stared out.

Then he began to see.
Immediately opposite him glimmered a huge white outline--in the incalculable night it might be a hundred yards or a mile away.

It was of irregular outline, for the star-strewn sky showed in patches and rifts above it.

And this white mass curved away beneath, under the ship in which he travelled, till it met, at a point which he could but just discern, a blackness that rose to meet it.
Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he began to see that the huge whiteness was flitting past, steadily and leisurely, from right to left; that it was streaked with shadows or clefts; and that following it, as in a sliding procession, came another, like it, yet (it seemed) more distant.
All this time, too, the silence was profound.