The captain and the mate were on deck, Vanderdecken abreast of the tiller, Van Vogelaar twenty paces forward of him, both still and stiff, gazing seawards with faces whose expressionlessness forbade your comparing them to sleeping dreamers. They looked the eternity that was upon them, and their ghastliness, the age and the doom of the ship, fell with a shock upon the perception to the horrible suggestions of those two figures and of the face at the tiller, whose tense and bloodless skin glared white to the sun as the little eyes, like rings of fire eating into the sockets beneath the brows, glanced from the card to the weather edges of the canvas. Yet I found comfort in their entranced posture and disregard of me, for the less I engaged their attention the safer I should be whilst in their ship, and memory being with them a deceptive and erratic quality, I might hope in time to find that they had forgot to hate me. I quitted the poop, not choosing to keep myself in view of Vanderdecken and Van Vogelaar, and walked about the quarter-deck, struggling hard with the dreadful despondency which clouded my mind, whilst imagination furiously beat against the iron-hard conditions which imprisoned me, as a bird rends its plumage in a cage, till my heart pulsed with the soreness of a real wound in my breast. The only glimmer of hope I could find lay, as I had again and again told Imogene, in the direction of the land. But who was to say how long a time would pass before the needs of the ship would force Vanderdecken shore-wards? And if the wind grew northerly and came feeble, how many weeks might we have to count ere this intolerable sailer brought the land into sight? Oh! I tell you, such speculations were sheerly maddening when I added to them the reflection that the heaving of the land into view might by no means prove a signal for our deliverance.