more, laved by water that would have become ice had it
been still.
It was intensely dark; the binnacle lamp was extinguished, and the light
in the cabin burned too dimly to throw the faintest colour upon the
hatchway. One thing I quickly noticed, that the gale had broken and
blew no more than a fresh breeze. The sea still ran very high, but
though every surge continued to hurl its head of snow, and the heavens
to resemble ink from contrast with the passage, as it seemed, close
under them of these pallid bodies, there was less spite in its wash, less
fury in its blow. The multitudinous roaring of the heaving blackness
had sobered into a hard and sullen growling, a sound as of thunder
among mountains heard in a valley.
The brig pitched and rolled heavily. Much of the buoyancy of her
earlier dance was gone out of her. Nevertheless, I could not persuade
myself that this sluggishness was altogether due to the water she had
taken in. It was wonderful, however, that she should still be afloat. No
man could have heard the rending and grating of her side against the ice
without supposing that every plank in it was being torn out.
Finding that I had the use of my voice, I holloaed as loudly as I could,
but no human note responded. Three or four times I shouted, giving
some of the people their names, but in vain. Father of mercy! I thought,
what has come to pass? Is it possible that all my companions have been
washed overboard? Certainly, five men at least were living before we
fouled the ice. And again I cried out, "Is there any one alive?" looking
wildly along the black decks, and putting so much force into my voice
with the consternation that the thought of my being alone raised in me,
that I had like to have burst a blood-vessel.
My loneliness was more terrible to me than any other condition of my
situation. It was dreadful to be standing, nearly dead with cold, in utter
darkness, upon the flooded decks of a hull wallowing miserably amid
the black hollows and eager foaming peaks of the labouring sea,
convinced that she was slowly filling, and that at any moment she
might go down with me; it was dreadful, I say, to be thus placed, and to
feel that I was in the heart of the rudest, most desolate space of sea in
the world, into which the commerce of the earth dispatched but few
ships all the year round. But no feature of my lamentable situation so
affrighted me, so worked upon the passions of my mind, as my
loneliness. Oh, for one companion, even one only, to make me an echo
for mine own speech! Nay, God Himself, the merciful Father of all,
even He seemed not! The blackness lay like a pall upon the deep, and
upon my soul. Misery and horror were within that shadow, and beyond
it nothing that my spirit could look up to!
I stood for some moments as one stunned, and then my
manhood--trained to some purpose by the usage of the sea--reasserted
itself; and maybe I also got some slender comfort from observing that,
dull and heavy as was the motion of the brig, there was yet the
buoyancy of vitality in her manner of mounting the seas, and that, after
all, her case might not be so desperate as was threatened by the way in
which she had been torn and precipitated past the iceberg. At moments
when she plunged the whiteness of the water creaming upon the surges
on either hand threw out a phantom light of sufficient power to enable
me to see that the forward part of the brig was littered with wreckage,
which served to a certain extent as a breakwater by preventing the seas,
which washed on to the forecastle, from cascading with their former
violence aft; also that the whole length of the main and top masts lay
upon the larboard rail and over the side, held in that position by the
gear, attached to them. This was all that I could distinguish, and of this
only the most elusive glimpse was to be had.
Feeling as though the very marrow in my bones were frozen, I crawled
to the companion and, pulling open the door, descended. The lamp in
the companion burnt faintly. There was a clock fixed to a beam over
the table; my eyes directly sought it, and found the time twenty minutes
after ten. This signified that I had ten or eleven hours of darkness
before me!
I took down the lamp, trimmed it, and went to the lazarette hatch at the
after end of the cabin. Here were kept
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