It takes time to record the events of thirty seconds, though all that now happened might have been compassed whilst a man told that space. 'Twas as if the frosty, blighting Curse of the ship they had dashed into had come upon their tongues, and hearts and souls. Over the side, where the grappling schooner lay, heaving with a cataractal roaring of water sounding out of the sea between, as the Flying Dutchman rolled ponderously towards her, loud orders in French were being delivered, mixed with passionate callings to the boarders upon our decks; the schooner's sails waved like the dark pinions of some monstrous sea-fowl past ours, which still drew, no brace having been touched. I guessed there were thirty in all that had leapt aboard, some of them negroes, all of them wildly attired in true buccaneering fashion, so far as the darkness suffered my eyes to see, in boots and sashes, and blouses and lolling caps; there they stood in a huddle of figures with lightning-like twitching gleams shooting off their naked weapons as they pointed or swayed or feverishly moved, staring about them. Some gazed up at the poop, where, as I presently discovered, stood the giant figure of Vanderdecken, his mates and the boatswain beside him, shapes of bronze motionlessly and silently watching. But the affrighting element--more terrible than the hellish glarings upon the planks, bulwarks and masts, more scaring than the amazing suggestions--to a sailor's eye--of the old guns, the two boats and all other such furniture as was to be embraced in that gloom--was the crowd of glimmering faces, the mechanic postures, the grave-yard dumbness of the body of spectral mariners who surveyed the boarding party in clusters, shadowy, and spirit-like. I felt the inspiration, and, with a pang of Heaven-directed sympathy with the terrors working in the Frenchmen's breasts, which needed but a cry to make them explode, I shouted from the blackness of my ambush, in a voice to which my sense of the stake the warning signified in its failure or success, lent a hurricane note: "_Sauvez vous! Sauvez vous! C'est l'Hollandais Volant!_" What manner of Paris speech this was, and with what accent delivered, I never paused to consider; the effect was as if a thunder-bolt had fallen and burst among them. With one general roar of _l'Hollandais Volant!_ the whole mob of them fled to the side, many dropping their weapons the better to scramble and jump. Why, you see that shout of mine exactly expressed their fears, it made the panic common; and 'twas with something of a scream in their way of letting out the breath in their echoing of my shout that they vanished, leaping like rats without looking to see what they should hit with their heads or tails.