This disaster, comparatively trifling as it was, gave the whole fabric a most melancholy, wrecked look. It affected me in a manner I should not have thought possible in one who knew so much about the sea and shipwreck as I. It impressed me as an omen of approaching dissolution. 'What, in God's name, can save us?' I remember thinking, as I brought my eyes away from the two broken masts, swinging and spearing high up under the smoke-coloured, compacted, apparently stirless heaps of vapour stretching from sea-line to sea-line. 'What put together by mortal hands can go on resisting this ceaseless, tremendous beating?' and as I thus thought the vessel, with a wild sweep of her bow, smote a giant surge rushing laterally at her, and a whole green sea broke roaring over the forecastle, making every timber in her tremble with a volcanic thrill, and entirely submerging the forepart in white waters, out of which she soared with a score of cataracts flying in smoke from her sides. I looked for the flag that Helga and I had half-masted a little while before; it had as utterly disappeared from betwixt its toggles as though the bunting had been ripped up and down by a knife. As I was in the act of dragging myself along to the ladder to go below, I spied a sort of smudge oozing out of the iron-hued thickness past the head of a great sea whose arching peak was like a snow-clad hill. I crouched down to steady myself, and presently what I had at first thought to be some dark shadow of cloud upon the near horizon grew into the proportions of a large ship, running dead before the gale under a narrow band of main-topsail.