CHAPTER III. IMOGENE AND I ARE MUCH TOGETHER. So far I have been minute, accounting for every hour and all things which happened therein since I was picked up by the mate of the Death Ship and put aboard her. My first impressions were keen and strong, and I have sought to lay them before you in the order in which they occurred. But to pursue this particularity of narrative, to relate every conversation, to regularly notice the striking of the clock, the movements of the skeleton, and the hoarse comminatory croak of the parrot, would be to speedily render this tale tedious. Therefore let me speak briefly for a little space. The storm blew with steady fury for six days, driving the tall fabric to leeward to a distance of many leagues every twenty-four hours, the course of the drift being as I should suppose--for it was impossible to put much faith in the compasses--about south-east by east, the larboard tacks aboard and the ship "ratching" nothing. It was so continuous and heavy, this gale, that it began to breed a feeling of despair in me, for I felt that if such weather lasted many weeks it would end in setting us so far south that we should be greatly out of the road taken by ships rounding the Cape, and so remote from the land, that should Vanderdecken desire to careen or water his vessel it would occupy us months to fetch the coast, so that the prospect of escaping with Miss Imogene grew small and gloomy. Added to which was the melancholy of the cell-like cabin in which it was my lot to sleep, the fiery crawlings, the savage squeakings of great rats, the grinding, groaning and straining noises of the labouring structure, likewise the sickening, sweeping, soaring, falling motions of the high light vessel, movements which, as we drove further south, where the seas were swollen into mountains by the persistent hardness of the gale and the vastness of the liquid plain along which they coursed, furious with the fiendish lashing of the thongs of the storm, grew at times so insupportable that, sailor as I was and used to the sea in all its moods, I would often feel faint and reel to a sensation of nausea. But Imogene was never in the least degree discomposed. She was so used to the ship that its movements were to her what the steadiness of dry land is to other women. She seldom came on deck however. Indeed, the gusts and guns were often so fierce--coming along like thunderbolts through the gale itself--that any one of them catching her gown might have carried her light figure overboard. Moreover, twenty-four hours after the gale set in, it drew up thick as mud; the horizon was brought within reach of a musket-shot; and out of this thickness blew the rain, in straight lines, mixed with the showering off the heads of the seas; the sky hung steady, of the colour of slate--no part lighter or darker than another, but so low that it appeared as if a man could whip his hand into it from our masthead whenever those reeling spars came plumb.