That night was a very dark night; pitch-black, moonless and clouded over, so that there was not even the little light from the stars. The blackness of the night seemed thick, oppressive. I could not catch even a gleam from the water, and it is very rarely the case that you cannot see the water now and then, even on a dark night. It seems much lighter at sea than it does on shore. Everybody aft had turned in, and there was no light showing from the stern ports, for I looked over the stern to see. I could not bring myself to turn in, for I was half afraid, to tell the whole truth, although I do not know what I was afraid of. The thick blackness of the night seemed ominous. I stood at the stern, looking out over the wake—which glowed dully with swirling phosphorescence—for a long time. Then I wandered forward, and stood under the fore rigging, on the weather side. The wind was fresh, and I heard the noise the Clearchus made going through the water, with an occasional muffled cluck of a block, the regular slatting of some slack rope against a sail, or perhaps the reef points. I looked along the deck, or where the deck ought to be, and I could see nothing. I felt as I used to feel on the infrequent occasions when my mother had shut me in a closet, except that there was no paroxysm of temper to make me forget the darkness, and that there was a feeling of utter loneliness, as though I were perched on nothing, all alone in the midst of a sea of blackness. I became almost afraid to move my feet for fear that there would be nothing under them. When Peter and the Prince spoke to me gently, at my shoulder, I very nearly cried out. If I had not heard the Prince I should not have known he was there. I could see no sign of him. Peter’s face was but a dim blur, and nothing of his body was visible. Your true whaleman does not go about his business clad in a natty white duck suit, like a navy sailorman, and with a teacup of a white hat perched upon his head; but he {285} wears old civilian clothes, which look—by daylight—as though they had been boiled in oil, and then, while still wet with it, had been dragged through all the dust of the wharves. Such clothes make him practically invisible on an ordinarily dark night. In a very low voice that was scarcely more than a whisper, Peter remarked that it was a black night. I agreed with him enthusiastically, and the Prince grunted his assent. We stood there by the fore rigging for some time in silence. None of us seemed to feel like talking, or to know what to say. “You can hardly see the fo’c’s’le lamp,” Peter observed at last. “It looks as if it was in a thick cloud of smoke. It won’t burn bright, whatever we do to it, and there ’s some that say there ’s a sort of halo around the flame, like the halos they put around the heads of their saints—like a sort of sun-dog. It may be so, though I did n’t see it. Something ’s going to happen, I ’m thinking. I never saw a darker night.”