"`Towards the afternoon I think I must have slept or fallen into a kind of a trance. The wind had quite gone down when I again recovered a sort of consciousness. There was no more broken water, but a heavy tumbling swell on the eastward when I looked. These huge heaving smooth waves seemed to take on the appearance of monsters of the deep, raising their awful heads and backs, grim and grey and cold, above the sea; but westward they were moving masses crimson and black. The sky was a wonderful sight. From the sun's upper limit to the zenith it was hung with curtains of blue-grey clouds, one behind the other, as it were, the edges all zig-zagged and fringed with red. All round the sun itself was a coppery haze. To the north the sky was clear and of a bright lemon yellow; to the east it was clear also, and _green_. "`I sat gazing at clouds, and sky till they faded into the gloom of night; they got thinner and thinner then, and stars shone through them, and soon they vanished entirely, and the stars had it all their own way. "`I felt no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no pleasure; my condition was one of pure apathy; my very soul appeared dead within me. "`Soon a bright light shone out of the north with tints of carmine, pale yellow, and green; it was the aurora, and long fringes of pale phosphorescent light descended from the sky overhead. I could have touched them with my hand had they been tangible. They were independent of the far-off aurora. They assumed the forms of gigantic fern leaves and danced dazzlingly before my eyes, and I could almost imagine they emitted a hissing, crackling sound. "`Then my brain began to reel, and I fell forward in the boat among my dead companions. "`A shock awoke me at last. Cold and shivering now, I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Morning was breaking gloomy and grey over the sea, and some gulls were wheeling and screaming about in the air. "`Once again the shock, and the boat trembled from stem to stern, and some birds rose up out of the bows and floated slowly away. They had been gorging on the dead. "`The shocks to the boat were easily accounted for: the sea was alive with monster sharks. "`O God! men, it was a fearful sight. There was something appalling and horrible in the very way they _gambolled_ around the boat. Their eyes told me one thing: they had come for the dead--and the living. "`I cannot tell you whether I really did lift the bodies of my late companions and throw them overboard. I would even now fain believe this was but a dream. If so, it was terribly real, the fighting, wrangling sharks in the sea, the birds wheeling and screaming above. "`My boat was picked up that day by some Icelandic fisherman; there was no one in it but myself, men, white in hair, white in beard, as you now behold me.'"