ry, shrieked,
"It's all over with us! We are upon it!"

I looked and perceived the iceberg to be within a musket-shot, whence it
was clear that it had been closer to us when first sighted than the
blackness of the night would suffer us to distinguish. In a time like
this at sea events throng so fast they come in a heap, and even if the
intelligence were not confounded by the uproar and peril, if indeed it
were as placid as in any time of perfect security, it could not possibly
take note of one-tenth that happens.

I confess that, for my part, I was very nearly paralyzed by the nearness
of the iceberg, and by the cry of the captain, and by the perception
that there was nothing to be done. That which I best recollect is the
appearance of the mass of ice lying solidly, like a little island, upon
the seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of the
black and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble back
to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was
not taller than our mastheads, yet it showed like a mountain hanging
over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow,
leaving us staring upwards out of the instant's stagnation of the trough
with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. It put a kind of film
of faint light outside the lines of its own shape, and this served to
magnify it, and it showed spectrally in the darkness as though it
reflected some visionary light that came neither from the sea nor the
sky. These points I recollect; likewise the maddening and maddened
motion of our vessel, sliding towards it down one midnight declivity to
another.

All other features were swallowed up in the agony of the time. One
monstrous swing the brig gave, like to some doomed creature's last
delirious struggle; the bowsprit caught the ice and snapped with the
noise of a great tree crackling in fire. I could hear the masts breaking
overhead--the crash and blows of spars and yards torn down and striking
the hull; above all the grating of the vessel, that was now head on to
the sea and swept by the billows, broadside on, along the sharp and
murderous projections. Two monster seas tumbled over the bows, floated
me off my legs, and dashed me against the tiller, to which I clung. I
heard no cries. I regained my feet, clinging with a death-grip to the
tiller, and, seeing no one near me, tried to holloa, to know if any man
were living, but could not make my voic