My instant belief was we were foul of ice, scaling some side of crystal mountain smooth as though chiselled. But when I opened the companion door I was nearly flung to the bottom of the steps by a very volcanic shock of gale, white as a cloud with snow and hail. I sprang again and gained the deck, and, shutting the door, got to leeward of the companion.
A furious Cape Horn squall was blowing over the ocean in smoke—from what quarter I had then to find out. The still scene of starlight night and sluggish rolling ocean was vanished. Already, with the magical swiftness of the weather of these regions, a sea was got up and beginning to race and foam. There was nothing to see. The night was blind with howling storm. When I had left the deck there was not so much as a rag of cloud to be seen in the sky; and now it was blowing a whole gale, which looked to boil with the snow that fled with it, and everywhere it was of a midnight blackness.
The rush of the wind was over the port quarter; but then the hull would be slewing for the trough, and how her head was when I had gone below I could not have told. Keeping this bearing of the wind in mind, I rushed to the cabin, picked up the burning bull's-eye, and, springing to the captain's berth, darted the flame on to the tell-tale, and saw that this squall or gale was out of about south-south-west.
When I took my eyes from the compass I saw Miss Otway standing, white as milk, in the doorway.
'What is it?' she asked.
'A heavy squall—perhaps the first of a gale: but that,' said I, with a flourish of the bull's-eye to the compass, 'gives us good news; we shall blow clear of the ice. The wind is sou'-sou'-west. What do you say to that?' and, forcing the noise of a jolly laugh, I came out of the berth and hooked up the bull's-eye ready to my hand.
We had seen the ocean all day long, clear of ice north and east; icebergs we knew were there, but their summits had settled—our drift had put leagues betwixt them and us; therefore I was not immediately fearful—on the score of ice, I mean. But if it was going to blow as hard as I had just now felt it, what was to become of the hull? Such fury and weight of wind must speedily raise the seas into cliffs, and then God knows how it would fare with the sheer hulk with not a rag, nor the means of stretching a rag, to enable her to look up to it, to shoulder it off with her bow, to lie hove to, in short, as a ship should.
In an hour, the dance was wild even to madness; my own brain reeled to it; sick I was not in the sense of nausea. Was it sickness of soul then? But I recollect that many times when the hull fell off the top of a sea into the valley, sliding as though she was shooting off some Niagara-like edge, a horrible feeling of faintness and prostration attended the descent. Never before had I suffered so at sea; but then, never before had I been tossed in a dismasted hull in a gale of wind sixty degrees south latitude.