A dismal picture with the sadness of despair coming into me out of it, when I looked at that square of bunting flaming in mute appeal from the stump-head to the blind horizon! But we had life, and so there must be hope, and rallying my spirits with a will, I strode the length of the life-line to the halliards, hauled the flag down, and went to the cabin to find and trim a lantern to hoist in its place. CHAPTER XV THE ICE IN THE SOUTH I left a light burning brightly at the mast-head: the wild meteoric dance of that gleam was a sort of hope: no ship sighting it but would guess from the rapidity of its oscillations that it danced on an open boat, or shone from some short height upon a dismasted hull. The wind was freshening with a long deep moan in the rush of it through the flying dusk when I left the deck: but I gathered from a general atmospheric hardening all round, a firmer line in the curl of the surge, a distincter flash in the foam of it, that it was to be a clear night, with perhaps a star or two by-and-by. The hull made good play: she was like a live thing; and no helm and no fragment of canvas vexing her, she took up her own position and wallowed dryly, save that now and again in a sharp pitch she'd meet some lateral run of sea and whiten in the air forward into the look of a snow-storm: but the froth mostly blew clear, and the water when it came streaming aft quickly froze into the snow. Miss Otway sat beside the stove: she had removed her hat, otherwise was wrapped up to the throat in furs; her yellow hair was shot with amber light when the swing of the lamp flashed the radiance upon it, but her looks were white, and something wild with grief, anxiety and fear. She asked me if there was any ice in sight. 'None that I can see in the dusk,' I answered. 'I'm all the while dreading the ice,' said she. 'I should not fear this high sea and our lying dismasted in it, if it were not for the ice.' 'There's none near to hurt us just now,' said I. 'When I first came into this cabin,' she exclaimed, 'in the Thames, a chill ran through me that was cold as ice itself. It was warm, and yet I shivered as though freezing. Was it an omen? The memory has been haunting me in my time of loneliness here. A little while before we were dismasted we sighted a huge iceberg that was like a cathedral: it had a beach of frozen foam, and the snow whirled in white dust on one side of it against the dark clouds. Oh, Mr. Selby,' she cried, 'think of this helpless hull striking against such a mountain of ice as that, and our getting upon it and perishing with the cold--the awful cold!'