see the ship again.

She was more on the beam now, than on the quarter; but I thought little
of that, in the astonishment of seeing her once more. It was only a
glimpse, I caught of her--dim and wavering, as though I looked at her
through the convolutions of heated air. Then she grew indistinct, and
vanished again; but I was convinced now that she was real, and had been
in sight all the time, if I could have seen her. That curious, dim,
wavering appearance had suggested something to me. I remembered the
strange, wavy look of the air, a few days previously, just before the
mist had surrounded the ship. And in my mind, I connected the two. It
was nothing about the other packet that was strange. The strangeness was
with us. It was something that was about (or invested) our ship that
prevented me--or indeed, any one else aboard from seeing that other. It
was evident that she had been able to see us, as was proved by her
signalling. In an irrelevant sort of way, I wondered what the people
aboard of her thought of our apparently intentional disregard of their
signals.

After that, I thought of the strangeness of it all. Even at that minute,
they could see us, plainly; and yet, so far as we were concerned, the
whole ocean seemed empty. It appeared to me, at that time, to be the
weirdest thing that could happen to us.

And then a fresh thought came to me. How long had we been like that? I
puzzled for a few moments. It was now that I recollected that we had
sighted several vessels on the morning of the day when the mist
appeared; and since then, we had seen nothing. This, to say the least,
should have struck me as queer; for some of the other packets were
homeward bound along with us, and steering the same course.
Consequently, with the weather being fine, and the wind next to nothing,
they should have been in sight all the time. This reasoning seemed to me
to show, unmistakably, some connection between the coming of the mist,
and our inability to _see_. So that it is possible we had been in that
extraordinary state of blindness for nearly three days.

In my mind, the last glimpse of that ship on the quarter, came back to
me. And, I remember, a curious thought got me, that I had looked at her
from out of some other dimension. For a while, you know, I really
believed the mystery of the idea, and that it might be the actual truth,
took me; instead of my realising just all that it might mean. It seemed
so exactly to express all