myself looking first forward,
then aft, as though, Heaven help me! my secret instincts foreboded that
at any moment I should behold some form from the forecastle, or one of
those figures in the cabin, stalking in, and coming to my side and
silently seating himself. I pshaw'd and pish'd, and querulously asked of
myself what manner of English sailor was I to suffer such womanly
terrors to visit me; but it would not do; I could not smoke; a coldness
of the heart fell upon me, and set me trembling above any sort of
shivers which the frost of the air had chased through me; and presently
a hollow creak sounding out of the hold, caused by some movement of the
bed of ice on which the vessel lay, I was seized with a panic terror and
sprang to my feet, and, lanthorn in hand, made for the companion-ladder,
with a prayer in me for the sight of a star!

I durst not look at the figures, but, setting the light down at the
foot of the ladder, squeezed through the companion-door on to the deck.
My fear was a fever in its way, and I did not feel the cold. There was
no star to be seen, but the whiteness of the ice was flung out in a wild
strange glare by the blackness of the sky, and made a light of its own.
It was the most savage and terrible picture of solitude the invention of
man could reach to, yet I blessed it for the relief it gave to my
ghost-enkindled imagination. No squall was then passing; the rocks rose
up on either hand in a ghastly glimmer to the ebony of the heavens; the
gale swept overhead in a wild, mad blending of whistlings, roarings, and
cryings in many keys, falling on a sudden into a doleful wailing, then
rising in a breath to the full fury of its concert; the sea thundered
like the cannonading of an electric storm, and you would have said that
the rending and crackling noises of the ice were responses to the
crashing blows of the balls of shadow-hidden ordnance. But the scene,
the uproar, the voices of the wind were real--a better cordial to my
spirits than a gallon of the mellowest vintage below; and presently,
when the cold was beginning to pierce me, my courage was so much the
better for this excursion into the hoarse and black and gleaming
realities of the night, that my heart beat at its usual measure as I
passed through the hatch and went again to the cook-room.

I was, however, sure that if I sat here long, listening and thinking,
fear would return. A small fire still burned; I put a saucepan on it,
and pop