, and even over the side, if possible, for one
place below was as sure to keep them haunting me as another, and they
would be as much with me in the forecastle as if I stowed them away in
the cabin adjoining mine.

Whilst I ate, my mind was so busy with considerations of the change in
the ship's posture during the night that it ended in determining me to
take a survey of her from the outside, and then climb the cliffs and
look around before I fell to any other work. I fetched the cloak I had
stripped the body on the rocks of and thawed and warmed it, and put it
on, and a noble covering it was, thick, soft, and clinging. Then, arming
myself with a boarding-pike to serve as a pole, I dropped into the
fore-chains and thence stepped on to the ice, and very slowly and
carefully walked round the schooner, examining her closely, and boring
into the snow upon her side with my pike wherever I suspected a hole or
indent. I could find nothing wrong with her in this way, though what a
thaw might reveal I could not know. Her rudder hung frozen upon its
pintles, and looked as it should. Some little distance abaft her rudder,
where the hollow or chasm sloped to the sea, was a great split three or
four feet wide; this had certainly happened in the night, and I must
have slept as sound as the dead not to hear the noise of it. Such a rent
as this sufficed to account for the subsidence of the after-part of the
schooner and her further inclination to larboard. Indeed, the hollow was
now coming to resemble the "ways" on which ships are launched; and you
would have conceived by the appearance of it that if it should slope a
little more yet, off would slide the schooner for the sea, and in the
right posture too--that is, stern on. But I prayed with all my might
and main for anything but this. It would have been very well had the
hollow gone in a gentle declivity to the wash of the sea, to the water
itself, in short; but it terminated at the edge of a cliff, not very
high indeed, but high enough to warrant the prompt foundering of any
vessel that should launch herself off it. Happily the keel was too
solidly frozen into the ice to render a passage of this description
possible; and the conclusion I arrived at after careful inspection was
that the sole chance that could offer for the delivery of the vessel to
her proper element was in the cracking up and disruption of the bed on
which she lay.

Having ended my survey of the schooner, I addresse