ecks in?"

At one moment he would call himself an idiot for not remaining on the
rocks at a distance and watching the explosion, and even make as if to
jump off the vessel, then immediately recoil from the idea of setting
his foot upon a floor that before he could take ten strides might split
into chasms, with hideous uproar under him. At another moment he would
run to the companion and descend out of my sight, but reappear after a
minute or two wildly shaking his head and swearing that if waiting was
insupportable in the daylight, it was ten thousand times worse in the
gloom and solitude of the interior.

I was too nervous and expectant myself to be affected by his behaviour;
but his dread of the explosion upheaving lumps of ice was sensible
enough to determine me to post myself under the cover of the hatch and
there await the blast, for it was a stout cover and would certainly
screen me from the lighter flying pieces.

It was three or four minutes past the hour and I was looking
breathlessly at my watch when the first of the explosions took place.
Before the ear could well receive the shock of the blast the whole of
the barrels exploded along with some twelve or fourteen parcels.
Tassard, who stood beside me, fell on his face, and I believed he had
been killed. It was so hellish a thunder that I suppose the blowing up
of a first-rate could not make a more frightful roar of noise. A kind of
twilight was caused by the rise of the volumes of white smoke out of the
ice. The schooner shook with such a convulsion that I was persuaded she
had been split. Vast showers of splinters of ice fell as if from the
sky, and rained like arrows through the smoke, but if there were any
great blocks uphove they did not touch the ship. Meanwhile, the other
parcels were exploding in their places sometimes two and three at a
time, sending a sort of sickening spasms and throes through the fabric
of the vessel, and you heard the most extraordinary grinding noises
rising out of the ice all about, as though the mighty rupture of the
powder crackled through leagues of the island. I durst not look forth
till all the powder had burst, lest I should be struck by some flying
piece of ice, but unless the schooner was injured below she was as sound
as before, and in the exact same posture, as if afloat in harbour, only
that of course her stern lay low with the slope of her bed.

I called to Tassard and he lifted his head.

"Are you hurt?" said I.