He looked at me with a grim stare for a moment, then burst into an idiotic laugh. That wild laugh is still ringing in my brain. "Ha! ha! ha!—Fire? fire? here it is, wreathing and coiling!—here! here!" dashing his hand against his forehead.
Perceiving that it was vain to reason with his madness, and fearing for the life of the wounded boy in my arms, I reluctantly left the hapless man to his fate.
The boat had already put off for the last time, but I succeeded in prevailing upon them to return, and leaping in, soon reached the Dart in safety.
The night set in wild and black as Death. Disparted and ragged masses of cloud were rushing over the face of the heavens, where once and again, the soaring moon, and that same bright, solitary star, would show their calm faces through the reeling rack, apparently flying from this scene of turmoil and death. The increasing wind howled mournfully through the rigging, and our battered hull staggered along the inky main writhing and shuddering on the heave of the surge like a weary, wounded thing.
We followed in the track of the burning vessel as she fled along before the gale, awaiting in breathless suspense the consummation of her wild career. The black smoke, interfulgent with tortuous tongues of lurid fire, rolled in immense volumes over her!—the red flames darted up her masts, along the spars and rigging, and gushed in swirling sheets from her ports and bulwarks, while in their fierce gleams, the billows that ramped and raved about her, glowed like a huge seething cauldron of molten iron, and the gloomy clouds that lowered above were tinged in their ragged borders, as with blood. Occasionally the jarring thunder of her cannon, as they became heated to explosion, announced to us the progress of the insidious destroyer.
But a still more thrilling spectacle awaited us. In the height of the conflagration, the hapless Percy, bearing his dead wife in his arms, emerged as it were from the very midst of the flames, and took a stand on the companion-way. So strongly was the tall, dark-figure relieved against the glowing element, that his slightest gesture could not escape our scrutiny. While with one arm he spanned the waist of the supple corse, which apparently struggled to escape from his grasp, he waved the other on high as if exulting in the whirl and commotion around him. He seemed like the minister of some dark rite of heathenism, preparing to offer up a victim to the Moloch of his superstition.
At length arrived the dreadful moment! The black hull seemed to be lifted bodily out of the water. A volume of smoke burst over her like the first eruption of a volcano! A spire of flame shot up to the heavens, filling the firmament with burning fragments, while the clouds that overhung the sea, were torn and scattered by the tremendous concussion. A crash followed—a deep, bellowing boom, as if the solid globe had split asunder!—then all was darkness—dreary, void, silent as death!