...
Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one
afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the
water to escape the flames....
And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down,
a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....
"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall
Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."
Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.
"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
on every side."
Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
clang of coal as it shot from shovels....
The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.
I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars .
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