Read "The Mirror of the Sea" by Joseph Conrad online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The unholy fascination of dread dwells in the thought of the last moments of a ship reported as "missing" in the columns of the _Shipping Gazette_. Nothing of her ever comes to light-no grating, no lifebuoy, no piece of boat or branded oar-to give a hint of the place and date of her sudden end. The _Shipping Gazette_ does not even call her "lost with all hands. " She remains simply "missing"; she has disappeared enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as the world, where your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a fellow-servant and lover of ships, may range unchecked.
And yet sometimes one gets a hint of what the last scene may be like in the life of a ship and her crew, which resembles a drama in its struggle against a great force bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic and mysterious, as fate.