hat
has come to pass? Is it possible that all my companions have been washed
overboard? Certainly, five men at least were living before we fouled the
ice. And again I cried out, "Is there any one alive?" looking wildly
along the black decks, and putting so much force into my voice with the
consternation that the thought of my being alone raised in me, that I
had like to have burst a blood-vessel.

My loneliness was more terrible to me than any other condition of my
situation. It was dreadful to be standing, nearly dead with cold, in
utter darkness, upon the flooded decks of a hull wallowing miserably
amid the black hollows and eager foaming peaks of the labouring sea,
convinced that she was slowly filling, and that at any moment she might
go down with me; it was dreadful, I say, to be thus placed, and to feel
that I was in the heart of the rudest, most desolate space of sea in the
world, into which the commerce of the earth dispatched but few ships all
the year round. But no feature of my lamentable situation so affrighted
me, so worked upon the passions of my mind, as my loneliness. Oh, for
one companion, even one only, to make me an echo for mine own speech!
Nay, God Himself, the merciful Father of all, even He seemed not! The
blackness lay like a pall upon the deep, and upon my soul. Misery and
horror were within that shadow, and beyond it nothing that my spirit
could look up to!

I stood for some moments as one stunned, and then my manhood--trained to
some purpose by the usage of the sea--reasserted itself; and maybe I
also got some slender comfort from observing that, dull and heavy as was
the motion of the brig, there was yet the buoyancy of vitality in her
manner of mounting the seas, and that, after all, her case might not be
so desperate as was threatened by the way in which she had been torn and
precipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whiteness
of the water creaming upon the surges on either hand threw out a phantom
light of sufficient power to enable me to see that the forward part of
the brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent as
a breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed on to the forecastle,
from cascading with their former violence aft; also that the whole
length of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over the
side, held in that position by the gear, attached to them. This was all
that I could distinguish, and of this only the most