Everywhere within the circle that my eyes covered--which was not a very big one, for in the night the mist was thick and low-lying--the old wrecks wedged together there were lighted with the same lambent flames: which came and went over their dead carcasses as though they all suddenly were lighted and then as suddenly were put out again; and farther away the glow of them in the mist was like a silvery shimmering haze. By this ebbing and flowing light--which seemed to me, for all that I knew the natural cause of it, so outside of nature that I thrilled with a creeping fear as I looked at it--I could see clearly the shapes of the strange ancient ships around me: their great poops and fore-castles rising high above their shallow waists, and here and there among them the remnant of a mast making a line of light rising higher still--like a huge corpse-candle shining against the blackness beyond. And the ruin of them--the breaks in their lines, and the black gaps where bits of their frames had rotted away completely--gave to them all a ghastly death-like look; while their wild tangling together made strange ragged lines of brightness wavering under the veil of mist, as though a desolate sea-city were lying there dead before me lit up with lanterns of despair. Yet that which most keenly thrilled me with a cold dread was my strong conviction that I could see living men moving hither and thither over those pale-lit decks, where my reason told me that only ancient death could be; for the play of the flickering light made such a commotion of fleeting flames and dancing shadows, going and coming in all manner of fantastic shapes, that every shattered hulk around me seemed to have her old crew alive and on board of her again--all hurrying in bustling crowds fore and aft, and up and down the heights of her, as though under orderly command. And at times these shapes were so real and so distinct to me that I was for crying out to them--and would check myself suddenly, shivering with a fright which I knew was out of all reason but which for the life of me I could not keep down. And so the night wore away: while I stood there on the galleon's poop with the soft pale flames flickering around me in the mist, and my fears rising and falling as I lost and regained control of myself; and I think that it is a wonder that I did not go mad. XXVII I SET MYSELF TO A HEAVY TASK At last, after what seemed to me an age of waiting for it, a little pinkish tone began to glow in the mist to the eastward; and as that honest light got stronger the death-fires on the old galleon and on the wrecks around her paled quickly until they were snuffed out altogether--and then came the customary morning down-pour of rain.