10 
A Storm at Sea. 
sea voyage. My other fellow-passengers were the true reflected images 
of my own miserable self, and the poor young lady, from the time of my 
disappearance, had shown herself outside of her cabin just as little as 
I had. 
40. 1 tut though feeling as much revived by the fresh sea air, in place 
of the musty and evil-smelling atmosphere of below-decks and cabin, as 
I was cheered by the boundless area of the Ocean, with Heaven’s vault 
resting on the horizon, I was nevertheless soon forced to seek that 
hateful confinement again: the distant sky had suddenly changed and a 
few squalls seemed to indicate the brewing of a storm. Everything 
remained quiet up to evening: the ship coursed through the waves fairly 
comfortably, and we turned in with the conviction that our fears had 
been groundless. We could hardly have been asleep an hour, however, 
before we were awakened by the violent and irregular motion of the 
vessel, and anyone who had not lost his senses through sea sickness, could 
surely have realised from the powerful rocking, creaking and rolling of 
the boat now wrestling with the up-rooted and unfettered waves, from 
the shrill orders of the Captain shouted through a speaking-trumpet, and 
from the yelling uproar of the sailors attempting in vain to overwhelm 
the howling of the storm and the smashing of the waves against the 
ship, that a hurricane had burst upon us in all its fury. 
41. For me, these first few seconds were the worst. The noise of 
the slackening sails, the oft-repeated vain attempts at reefing them, the 
confusing clatter consequent on the storm breaking its force on the 
loosely-hanging canvas before the sailors succeeded in gaining its absolute 
mastery, the rattling of the chains and cables that drowned every word 
spoken by the men, all combined to produce so bewildering an effect that 
the most firmly determined will must have yielded to the excitement. 
I dashed on deck, then down again : everywhere the same upset. Though 
stunned by the confusing din and uproar of the natural elements 
unshackled in all their rage, I at. once thought that the material and 
human contents of the cabin were suffering jointly and individually from 
an attack of St. Vitus’ Dance. Everything that was not clinched and 
riveted flew in the maddest fashion from the one side to the other, and 
fortunate was he who, even proceeding with the utmost caution, was not 
thrown down, rolled along like the play-ball of Fate, and dotted over 
in black and blue, before finally reaching his intended goal. The storm 
raged until the 2nd January and reached its greatest violence during the 
night of 31st December to January 1st. These were days of real dis- 
comfort and terror: a gloomy grey sky and sea, through which here and 
there black spectral clouds rushed like ammunition-carts to the 
field of battle. The breeze howled and growled in deafening din ; 
creaking and loudly shrieking it bore along with it the moaning and the 
groaning of the masts and the dull thundering of the block and tackling 
tumbling up against them, while the high plunging waves, greedy for 
their prey, stormed the vessel's frail planking which quivered in its very 
joints, or else they hid the ship momentarily in their watery arms and 
tore off from her decks everything that stood in their way. 
42. Even though the terror and confusion in the cabin were amply suf- 
ficient on the outbreak of the storm they were now increased to a much 
higher pitch. My dreamt-of courage succumbed, and involuntarily there 
crossed my memory during this awful New Year’s Eye the previous ones 
