16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
might induce skin troubles, some forms of paralysis,
constipation or uncontrolled flux, and
in a man like Martin all the consequences of
extreme anxiety, guilt and self-loathing; but
not these particular miseries: he had seen
something of the same nature in a patient
whose wife was steadily poisoning him. More
from intuition than any clear reasoning he expected
a crisis of distress either about three in
the morning, during what the Navy emphatically
called the graveyard watch, when so
many people die, or else at dawn.
He sat on: and although the ship was full of
sound – the hissing rush of water along her
side, the combined voices of all her rigging
under a press of sail, the churn of the pumps,
for with such a wind and such a sea she was
hauling under the chains and making a fair
amount of water, and from time to time the
drumming of yet another squall – he was by