'There was little to go. What but the galley? The companion has weathered it out, happily for us.' 'Oh, Mr. Selby, what can we now do? What is to become of us?' she cried with sudden hysteric passion of grief and terror. 'We must find out where we are. Better here, anyway, than knocking about among the ice outside, with the prospect every next minute of being squashed into pulp. Oh, _that_ was too terrible to have gone on bearing! The perpetual apprehension was like to have driven us overboard, mad. Why, this is peace, this is rest.' 'What a time it has been! What a time it is!' she cried. 'When will the day break? If we are upon an iceberg----' She was arrested by a second thunder-shock of water overhead, yet weak as a blow of the sea, though the hull trembled fore and aft. The lamp glowed and shed a good light, the body of it lying hard against the upper deck, so sharp was the angle; it was strange to see it stirless there, strange to feel the stillness of the hull, save when a blow of swell made her quiver. The fire was out; but even had not all the fuel fetched away into the wash of the wet, I had not dared kindle a fresh one, lest in the trembling fit then upon me, and on such a roof-like slope as that, I should stumble, or by some helpless flourish set the ship in flames. I crawled on my knees to the couch, and pulled the clothes from it and covered Miss Otway with them, swathing her head and so wrapping her that nothing showed but a little piece of the face. The poor girl's teeth chattered, and she shivered ceaselessly. By carefully crawling I got upon the table and managed to get hold of a glass and a decanter of wine. She drank a little and I took a good pull of the wine myself. Indeed it was an extraordinary situation--the hull on her beam ends, the cabin alight, we two crouched on the deck, the stillness after the fury we had come through, the stillness, I say, saving a low roar of distant sea, with an occasional beat of the swell upon the hulk, and the scaling and rushing of water overhead. An amazing situation indeed; there is nothing like it, nothing stranger in the maritime records, that I can recollect.