It was now drawing on toward six o'clock, and the aspect of the coming night was very threatening. The sky was completely overspread with a vast unbroken curtain of inky cloud, torn and shredded into a countless host of ragged, fantastic shapes that came rushing up from the northward and westward at headlong speed before the breath of the raving gale, while the air was thick and salt with the ceaseless pelting of the brine torn from the wave-crests, and swept along in a drenching, pitiless rain by the mad fury of the wind. The sea was rising fast, and already presented a formidable and threatening aspect as the towering liquid hills swept successively down upon the ship, froth-laced, and each capped by a hissing, roaring crest of milky foam that reared itself nearly to the height of our foretop over the weather-bow--so steep was it--ere the barque rose to and surmounted it in a smothering deluge of spray. Yet we were doing well; for although, under the tremendous pressure of the wind upon her two close-reefed topsails, the ship was heeled to her covering-board, while in some of her wild lee rolls she careened until her topgallant rail was awash and it became impossible to maintain one's footing on the deck without holding on to something, she looked well up into the wind, and rode the boiling fury of the sea as buoyantly as a cork. Her foredeck, it is true, from the knight-heads to well abaft the galley, was streaming with the water that incessantly poured over her weather-bow in a torrent of spray; but abaft that the decks would have been dry but for the drenching spindrift.