midnight
The sand about him was dyed by the pool of blood which had long since filtered through . Maskull left the corpse in dismay , and walked a long way along the sweet-smelling shore . Sitting down on a rock , he waited for daybreak . At midnight , when Teargeld was in the south , throwing his shadow straight toward the sea and making everything nearly as bright as day , he saw a great tree floating in the water , not far out . It was thirty feet out of the water , upright , and alive , and its roots must have been enormously deep and wide . It was drifting along the coast , through the heavy seas . Maskull eyed it incuriously for a few minutes .