contrition and shame. My passion
of sorrow was so extravagant, indeed, that I remember looking at the
Frenchman as if he was the devil incarnate, who had put himself in my
way to thaw and recover, that he might tempt me on to the loss of my
soul. Fortunately these fancies did not last. I was parched with thirst,
but the water was ice, and there was no fire to melt it with; so I
broke off some chips and sucked them, and held a lump to my forehead. I
went to my cabin and got into my hammock, but my head was so hot, and
ached so furiously, and I was so vexed with myself besides, that I could
not sleep. The schooner was deathly still; there was not apparently the
faintest murmur of air to awaken an echo in her; nothing spoke but the
near and distant cracking of the ice. It was miserable work lying in the
cabin sleepless and reproaching myself, and as my burning head robbed
the cold of its formidableness, I resolved to go on deck and take a
brisk turn or two.

The night was wonderfully fine; the velvet dusk so crowded with stars
that in parts it resembled great spaces of cloth of silver hovering. I
turned my eyes northwards to the stars low down there and thought of
England and the home where I was brought up until the tears gathered,
and with them went something of the dreadful burning aching out of my
head. Those distant, silent, shining bodies amazingly intensified the
sense of my loneliness and remoteness, and yonder Southern Cross and the
luminous dust of the Magellanic clouds seemed not farther off than my
native country. It is not in language to express the savage naked
beauty, the wild mystery of the white still scene of ice, shining back
to the stars with a light that owed nothing to their glory; nor convey
how the whole was heightened to every sense by the element of fear, put
into the picture by the sounds of the splitting ice, and the softened
regular roaring of the breakers along the coast.

I started with fresh shame and horror when I contrasted this ghastly
calmness of pale ice and the brightness of the holy stars looking down
upon it, with our swinish revelry in the cabin, and I thought with
loathing of the drunken ribaldry of the pirate and my own tipsy songs
piercing the ear of the mighty spirit of this solitude. The exercise
improved my spirits; I stepped the length of the little raised deck
briskly, my thoughts very busy. On a sudden the ice split on the
starboard hand with a noise louder than the explos