my hair was matted with the
salt of the spray, and my hands were burnt with a consuming fire, and
my body was chill or hot with the fever of the long exposure, did I,
from such a pinnacle, cast my eyes around the foam-decked waste, and
finding it all barren, feel my heart sink as the dinghy swept again
into the dark-green abyss, and all around me were the walls of water!
How many prayers did not I send up in the silence of my heart: how many
thoughts of Roderick and of Mary, how many farewells to them! And when
I prayed for life, and no answer seemed to come, and I remembered the
years that might have been before me--years now to be unknown in the
silence of the grave--I had a great bitterness against all fate and all
men, and I crouched in the boat with my suffering heavy upon me. But
Black continued to drink, and when the sun fell low in the west, and
the whole heavens were as mountains and peaks of the crimson fire, I
knew by his mutterings that the frenzy of the old madness was upon him.

At one time he called upon his wife, I doubt not, and gave mad words of
self-reproach and of regret. And then he would mutter of his son, as
though the lad could help him; and many times he cried out: "My God!
the ship's going--hands, lower boats!" Or he raved with fierce threats
and awful cries at the American he had buried, or made desperate
appeals to some apparition that came to him in his dreadful dream. But
at the last he grew almost incoherent, thinking that I was the dead
lad; and he set himself wildly to chafe my hands, and put spirit at my
lips. I was then nigh dead with want of sleep and fatigue, for I had
not rested during the fight with the ironclads; and when he covered me
with the small tarpaulin, and made a rough pillow in the bow, I went to
sleep almost at once; and was as one drunk with the torpor of the rest.

Twice during that long night I must have roused myself. I recall well a
heaven of stars, and a moonlit sea glowing with the pale light; while
looking down upon me were the eyes of a madman, who clutched the sides
of the dinghy with trembling and claw-like hands, and had a scream upon
his lips. And again at the second time I looked upward to behold a
faint break of grey in the leaden sky, and to feel warm raindrops
beating upon me. But I heard no sound, and scarce turning in my
heaviness, I slept again; and all through my sleep I dreamed that there
was the echo of a voice, as of the voice of the damned, call