My throat felt like hot brass; I tried to pray, but could
not. Imagination grew a little delirious, and I would sometimes
fancy that the terrible shape at the foot of the mainmast moved
as if seeking to free itself and approach me. There was a constant
glancing of shooting stars on high, swift sparklings and trailings
of luminous dust, and, as on the previous night, here and there
upon the horizon a dim violet play of sheet-lightning. It was like
being at the bottom of the sea, alive there, to be in this black,
shelly, weed-smelling ship. Whether my thoughts came to me waking
or sleeping I cannot tell, but I know some mad fancies possessed
me, and upon the sable canvas of the night, imagination, like
a magic lantern, flung a dozen febriletinctured pictures, and
I particularly recollect conceiving that I was my own soul at the
bottom of the ocean in the ship; that, in the green twilight of
the valley in which I was, I saw many forms of dead men standing or
lying or sitting, preserving the postures in which they had come
floating down into the darkly gleaming profound--figures of sailors
of different centuries clad in the garb of their times, intermixed
with old ordnance making coarse and rusty streaks upon the sand,
the glitter of minted money, the gleam of jewels, and fish brightly
apparelled and of shapes unknown to man floating round about like
fragments of rainbow.
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