There was a deep stillness fore and aft. No human voice broke the silence. You heard but the purring of the surges frothing against our sides, the flap of a sail to the regular roll of the fabric, a groan from the heart of her, the soft shock of the sudden hit of a billow. Nothing more. The silence of the unmeasurable deep grew into a distinct sense undisturbed by the gentle universal hissing that went up out of it. The sails of the oncoming ship shone to the gushing of the sunlight like radiant leaning columns of a porphyritic tincture breaking into moonlike alabaster with the escape of the shadows to the sunward stare of the cloths. Bland as the fairy glory of the full moon floating in a sea of ethereal indigo was the shining of those lustrous bosoms, each course and topsail tremulous with the play of the golden fringe of reef-points, and delicate beyond language was the pencilled shadowings at the foot of the rounded cloths. Like cloud upon cloud those sails soared to the dainty little royals, above the foremost of which there blew Britannia's glorious flag, the blood-red cross of St. George upon a field white as the foam that boiled to as high as the hawse pipes with the churning of the shearing cutwater storming like a meteor through the blue. Oh, she was English! You felt the blood of her country hot in her with the sight of her flag that was like a crown upon an hereditary brow, making her queen of the dominion of the sea, roll where it would! She approached us like a roll of smoke, and the wash of the froth along her black and glossy bends threw out the mouths of her single tier of cannon. She was apparently a thirty-eight-gun ship, and as she drew up, with a luffing helm that brought the after-yard-arms stealing out past the silky swells of the sails on the fore, you spied the glitter and flash of the gold-coloured figure-head, a lion, with its paw upon Britannia's shield. When she was within a mile of us she hauled down her studding-sails, clewed up her royals and mizzen topgallant sail, and drove quietly along upon our weather-quarter, still heeling as though she would have us note how lustrous was the copper, whose brightness rose to the water-line, and what finish that ruddy sheathing, colouring the snow of the blue water leaping along it with a streaking as of purple sunshine, gave to her charms. All this while, the master, mates and crew of the Death Ship were as mute as though they lay in their coffins. Vanderdecken leaned upon his hand on the rail above the quarter-gallery, and the motion which the heave of the ship gave to his giant form by the sweeping of it up and down the heavens at the horizon emphasised his own absolute motionlessness. Nevertheless, his gaze was rooted in the ship, and the brightening of the angry sparkle in them to the nearing of the man-of-war was a never-to-be-forgotten sight.