Любимые рассказы на английском / Best Short Stories

�Slowly, with infinite caution and patience, they crept closer and closer, seeing no more of the cliffs than an evanescent dark loom with a narrow border of angry foam at its foot. At the moment of anchoring the fog was so thick that for all they could see they might have been a thousand miles out in the open sea. Yet the shelter of the land could be felt. There was a peculiar quality in the stillness of the air. Very faint, very elusive, the wash of the ripple against the encircling land reached their ears, with mysterious sudden pauses.

�The anchor dropped, the leads were laid in. The commanding officer went below into his cabin. But he had not been there very long when a voice outside his door requested his presence on deck. He thought to himself: “What is it now?” He felt some impatience at being called out again to face the wearisome fog.

�He found that it had thinned again a little and had taken on a gloomy hue from the dark cliffs which had no form, no outline, but asserted themselves as a curtain of shadows all round the ship, except in one bright spot, which was the entrance from the open sea.

Several officers were looking that way from the bridge. The second in command met him with the breathlessly whispered information that there was another ship in the cove.

�She had been made out by several pairs of eyes only a couple of minutes before. She was lying at anchor very near the entrance – a mere vague blot on the fog’s brightness.

And the commanding officer by staring in the direction pointed out to him by eager hands ended by distinguishing it at last himself. Indubitably a vessel of some sort.

�“It’s a wonder we didn’t run slap into her when coming in,” observed the second in command.

�“Send a boat on board before she vanishes,” said the commanding officer. He surmised that this was a coaster. It could hardly be anything else. But another thought came into his head suddenly.

“It is a wonder,” he said to his second in command, who had rejoined him after sending the boat away.

�By that time both of them had been struck by the fact that the ship so suddenly discovered had not manifested her presence by ringing her bell.

�“We came in very quietly, that’s true,” concluded the younger officer. “But they must have heard our leadsmen at least. We couldn’t have passed her more than fifty yards off.