With hands clasped upon my arm, my darling looked as I pointed. In the extreme west the shade of the heavens was a sort of dismal slate, and there was an incessant winking of lightning all about it, like a mad dancing of stars of piercing brilliance; this enlarged into dense masses of dark vapour streaked as sand is ribbed by the action of surf; then zenith-wards was a space of faint green sky, very dim as though beheld through smoke, and past this lay a floating body of thin vapour thickening over our mastheads into an amazing appearance of clouds like to the bush that shags the New Holland slopes, merging eastwards into a vast array of clouds twisted into the aspect of whirlpools, and in their brooding motionlessness resembling vortices suddenly arrested when most madly gyrating. But this description, though imitated to the life, conveys not the least idea of the horrid appearance of that sky, for there is nothing in words to express the effect upon the mind of the contrast of the several shades of colour all combinating to fill the sea with a malignant hue, and the keen throbbing of the lightning low down, the washing sweep of the sick and ghastly ocean into the western dusk, the stooping soot of the vaporous maelstroms overhead, only waiting, as it seemed, for some storm-signal to start off every one of them into a very madness of revolution, boiling out into wet and crimsoned tempests.
After a little all these appearances melted into one great cloud of an indigo tint, ridged with layers of black vapour and blackening into very midnight on the western seaboard where the lightning was shooting. The sea had strangely flattened; the weighty swells which had precoursed the growth of the storm had run away down the eastern waters; it was as though the hot heaviness of the rising and spreading blackness had pressed down the ocean into a smooth plain.
As not an order had yet been given, not a clewline nor a halyard touched, I had made up my mind to presently behold an astonishing exhibition of magic; that is to say, I was to witness a sudden violent blast of storm strike this Death Ship with every sail she carried abroad, and no harm to come to her from it. All at once there was a great stroke of lightning that flashed up the heavy oppressive obscurity, and the whole ship leapt to the eye in a blaze of emerald fire. There fell a few huge drops of rain, covering the decks with circles as big as saucers. A sullen shock of thunder boomed in a single report out of the west, and then it was that the voice of Vanderdecken rang out like a vibratory echo of the deep storm-note that had died away.
"Clew up the topsails and topgallant sails!"
"In sprit-sail and get the yard fore and aft!"
"Some hands this way and stow the mizzen!"
"Lower the main-yard and furl the sail!"
"Stand by to double reef the fore-course!"
These and other orders he delivered one by one, and they were repeated by the two mates and the boatswain.
I cannot believe that any fantastic vision was ever wilder, stranger, more impressive than the picture offered by the Death Ship when her men went to work to snug her down. Their mechanically-moving shapes hauling upon the ropes, running like shadows along the decks, vanishing in the sullen, swarming thickness as they mounted the shrouds, every man as silent as a spectre; the fitful trembling out of the whole vessel to the white and green and violet glimmer of the yet distant lightning; the dark sea dimly glancing into a kind of light, wan and indeterminable as the sheen of stars in polished steel, under the play of those western glitterings; the blackness overhead now settled down to the eastern seaboard, over the horizon of which there yet hovered a streak of dusty green—it was a spectacle to need the hand of Dante or Milton.