ion, which lasted about twenty
or thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftly
descending in a balloon, or in falling from a height whilst pent up in a
coach.

For a little while the schooner heeled over so violently that the
benches and all things movable in the cook-room slided as far as they
could go, and I heard a great clatter and commotion among the freight in
the hold. She then came upright again, and simultaneously with this a
vast mass of water tumbled on to the deck and washed over my head, and
then fell another and then another, all in such a way as to make me know
that the ice had broken and slipped the schooner close to the ocean,
where she lay exposed to its surges, but not free of the ice, for she
did not toss or roll.

I seized the lanthorn and sprang to the cabin, where I hung it up, and
mounted the companion-steps. But as I put my hand to the door to thrust
it open a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling and
thundering past the companion-hatch in such a way as to advise me that I
need but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beating
very hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myself
on deck lest I should be immediately swept into the sea. 'Twas the most
terrible time I had yet lived through in this experience. To every blow
of the billows the schooner trembled fearfully; the crackling noises of
the ice was as though I was in the thick of a heavy action. The full
weight of the wind seemed to be upon the ship, and the screeching of it
in the iron-like shrouds pierced to my ear through the hissing and
tearing sounds of the water washing along the decks, and the volcanic
notes of the surges breaking over the vessel. I say, to hear all this
and not to be able to see, to be ignorant of the situation of the
schooner, not to know from one second to another whether she would not
be crushed up and crumbled into staves, or be hurled off her bed and be
pounded to fragments upon the ice-rocks by the seas, or be dashed by the
cannonading of the surge into the water and turned bottom up, made this
time out and away more terrible than the collision between the _Laughing
Mary_ and the iceberg.

I drew my breath with difficulty, and stood upon the companion-ladder
hearkening with straining ears, my hand upon the door. I was now
sensible of a long-drawn, stately, solemn kind of heaving motion in the
schooner, which I put down to the rolling of the ic