or victuals and perished of cold.

Hope lives like a spark amid the very blackest embers of despondency.
Twenty minutes before I had awakened from a sort of swoon and was
overwhelmed with misery; and now here was I taking a collected view of
my situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on the
whole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered from
putting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at the
shadowy conducting of the hand of God; yet from every stage we arrive at
we look back and know the road we have travelled to be the right one
though we start afresh mutinously. Lord, what patience hast Thou!

I turned my back upon the clamorous ocean and started to ascend the
slope once more. When I reached the brow of the cliffs I observed that
the clouds had lost their fleeciness and taken a slatish tinge, were
moving fast and crowding up the sky, insomuch that the sun was leaping
from one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon the
scene. The wind was bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears when
I met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did not
surprise me. I knew these seas, and that our English April is not more
capricious than the weather in them, only that here the sunny smile,
though sparkling, is frostier than the kiss of death, and brief as the
flight of a musket-ball, whilst the frowns are black, savage, and
lasting.

I bore the dead man's cloak on my arm and helped myself along with the
oar, and presently arrived at the brink of the slope in whose hollow lay
the ship as in a cup. The wind made a noisy howling in her rigging, but
the tackling was frozen so iron hard that not a rope stirred, and the
vane at the masthead was as motionless as any of the adjacent steeples
or pillars of ice. My heart was dismayed again by the figure of the man.
He was more dreadful than the other because of the size to which the
frozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and the
half-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in the
very act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should have died in
that easy leaning posture was strange; however, I supposed, and no doubt
rightly, that he had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had leaned
upon the rail and so expired. The cold would quickly make him rigid and
likewise preserve him, and thus he might have been leaning,
contemplating the ice of the cliffs,