inertia that gripped me, mind and body; thus when not lost in troubled
sleep I would lie motionless, staring dully at the dim flame of the
lanthorn or blinking sightless on the dark.

This strange sickness (as hath been said) I then set down to no more
than confinement and my unwholesome situation, in the which supposition
I was very far beside the mark, as you shall hear. For there now befell
a thing that roused me from my apathy once and for all, and thereby
saved me from miserably perishing and others with me, and the manner of
it thus:

On a time as I lay 'twixt sleep and wake, my glance (and for no reason
in the world) chanced upon that knot-hole in the opposite bulkhead, the
which (as already told) I had wrought into the likeness of a great eye.
Now, as I stared at it, the thing seemed, all at once, to grow instinct
with life and to stare back at me. I continued to view it (dully
enough) until little by little I became aware of something strange
about it, and then as I watched this (that was no more than a
knot-hole) the thing winked at me. Thinking this but some wild fancy
or a trick of the light I lay still, watching it beneath my lowered
lids, and thus I suddenly caught the glitter of the thing as it moved
and knew it for a very bright, human eye that watched me through the
knot-hole. Now this may seem a very small matter in the telling, but
to me at that moment (overwrought by my long sojourn in the dark) it
was vastly otherwise.

For maybe a full minute the eye stared at me, fixed and motionless and
with a piercing intensity, then suddenly was gone, and I lying there,
my flesh a-tingle, my heart quick-beating in a strange terror, so that
I marvelled to find myself so shaken. Leaping up in sudden fierce anger
I wrenched open the door and rushed forth, only to fall headlong over
some obstacle; and lying there bruised and dazed heard the soft thud
and scamper of rats in the dark hard by. So I got me back to my bunk,
and lying there fell to a gloomy reflection. And the more I thought,
the fiercer grew my anger that any should dare so to spy upon me.

Thus it was in one of my blackest humours that Godby found me when,
having set down the victuals he had brought, he closed the crazy door
and seated himself on the cask that served me as chair, and bent to
peer at me where I lay.

"Mart'n," said he, speaking almost in a whisper, "be ye awake at last?"
For answer I cursed him heartily. "Avast, pal!" says he