But for my unwillingness to meet the passengers I should have gone on deck. I felt a sort of madness upon me that afternoon. It came and went, but when the feeling was upon me I craved for the open air, for the sweep and trumpeting of the wind, for a sight of the great ship hurling onwards, for a sight too of the warring waters; and at these moments I said to myself, I will not go on deck now and meet the passengers; I will wait until the darkness comes; I will wait until the people are sleeping, and the silence of the slumber of many is upon the ship, as it was last night, and then I will steal on deck and ease the torments of my sightless mind by blending my thoughts with the dark picture of ship and white-peaked seas and rushing black-winged sky; and this I will do in some obscure corner of the ship, where I shall not be seen. But when the inscrutable horror, the insupportable agitation which drove me into this resolution of going on deck at midnight had passed, I shivered and stealthily wept, for _then_ I seemed to see an awful shadow, a menacing shape of darkness, crouching and skulking behind my impulse--a spectre of self-murder, whose first step it would be to impel me on deck in the darkness of the night, and whose next step after I should have stood lonely for some time on deck would be to tempt me to leap overboard into the ocean grave, where my memory lay! Yes, there could be no doubt that I was a little mad, sometimes more than a little mad at intervals during that afternoon, and one cause of those fits of horror and despair, and of the desire to mingle my spirit with the wild commotion outside, and to pass out of myself into the starry freedom of the blowing ocean-night, lay in a sort of dumb, blind anguish that racked me when the clouding of my cabin-window by the passing foam carried my thoughts to the speeding of the ship through the sea. Though I knew not from what or where, yet I seemed to feel with God knows what muteness, and blindness and faintness of instinct, that I was being borne away--that, wherever my home might be, from it I was being swept. Feeling indeed was no more than seeming; I could be sure of nothing; thought was absolutely indeterminate; nevertheless there was a secret movement in my dark mind that goaded me, as though the tooth of something venomous, unreachable, and unconjecturable was subtly at work within me. But having fallen into a short doze, I awoke calm, and then I resolved that I would not go on deck that night, for I feared, if I should be visited whilst on deck, and in darkness, by such moods as had tormented me throughout the afternoon, I should destroy myself.