On our boat, cold, in the midst of a particularly lonely sea. Clouds sitting overhead, fat fearsome and lazy, refused to let any sun filter through. Biscoe was standing on the deck, eyes dulled by the frozen wind, struggling for a matchstick to set his meagre smoke alight. Both hands were in pockets, clenched against the heartless temperature - he knew one must be sacrificed to the elements, in order that the smoke be lit. But the hiss was overwhelming, that primitive engine spewing forth steady clouds of smoke, chuffing on and on through the endless swathes of water, wasted and useless. Now and then a great clanging would come, as the hull punched through some nonsensical underwater ice pack. He resigned to his fate, removing one hand - his left - first from the pocket, then from its own tender glove. Steam rose up from that now-empty glove hole in a childish imitation of the grand machine's chimney stack. Vapours are at the essence of our construction, much the same as any good boat, Biscoe thought, as he inhaled the product of the cigarette's own combustion. "Lad!" Biscoe shouted through the unfriendly air. "Lad! What do you make of that". He pointed the lad toward what he had been regarding. It looked like a very vague dash in the sea at the horizon. A dirty smudge on an otherwise flawless daguerreotype. The lad peered and peered, trembling terribly through his too-thin clothes, until he, too, saw the smudge. "Could it be real, sir?" said the lad, "could it be land?". Biscoe took another drag through his lips, holding the warm smoke in his own lungs for a long moment, before spewing forth another cloud of smoke. "Yes, lad, its land. I'd say its Enderby Land". At that very moment, a great cachalot breached by the aft of the boat.
Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.
