Читать книгу The Castaways of the Flag: The Final Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson онлайн

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Twenty minutes went by. The breath of wind, which at first was almost imperceptible, grew stronger. The rippling aft became louder. The boat made a few rougher motions, not caused by the slow, nauseating swell. Folds of the sail spread out, fell flat, and opened again, and the sheet sagged against its cleats. The wind was not strong enough yet to fill the heavy canvas of the foresail and the jib. Patience was needed, while the boat’s head was kept to her course as well as might be by means of one of the sculls.

A quarter of an hour later, progress was marked by a light wake.

Just at this moment one of the passengers who had been lying in the bows got up and looked at the rift in the clouds to the eastward.

“Is it a breeze?” he asked.

“Yes,” John Block answered. “I think we have got it this time, like a bird in the hand—and we won’t let go of it!”

The wind was beginning to spread steadily now through the rift, through which, too, the first gleams of light must come. From south-east to south-west, the clouds still hung in heavy masses, over three-quarters of the circumference of the sky. It was still impossible to see more than a few cables’ lengths from the boat, and beyond that distance no ship could have been detected.