midnight
It rolled sickeningly in the oily wrinkled waters , and Alexander put his Pope in his pocket . The sea had a curious swell , and he wondered if an earthquake were imminent . The sea was not quite herself when her foundations were preparing to shake . Earth-quakes had never concerned him , but as the boat drifted past the reef into the harbour of Christianstadt at midnight , he was assailed by a fit of terror so sudden and unaccountable that he could recall but one sensation in his life that approached it : shortly after he arrived on the Island he had stolen down to the lagoon one night , fascinated by the creeping mist , the scowling manchineels , the talk of its sinister inhabitant , and was enjoying mightily his new feeling of creeping terror , when the silence was broken by a heavy swish , and he saw the white belly of the shark not three feet from him . He had scampered up the hill to his mother 's skirts as fast as his legs could carry him , nor visited the lagoon again until the shark was mouldering on its bed . To-night a mist , almost imperceptible except on the dark line of coast , changed the beauty of the moonbeams to a livid light that gave the bay the horrid pallor of a corpse . The masses of coral rock in the shallow waters looked leprous , the surface was so glassy that it fell in splinters from the oars of the boat that towed them to shore .