He had slowly turned his eyes upon me when I began to speak, and now made a haughty gesture with his hand as if bidding me hold my peace. And perhaps my conscience felt the rebuke, though he merely designed to let me know that I had said enough; for, between ourselves, I had as little opinion of Dutch generosity as I had of Dutch valour, and should have despised myself for this flattering had I been talking to human beings. Happily nothing more came of the tempest that lay muzzled in the captain's breast. Whether my standing up for myself, my heated manner towards his mate, gave a new turn to his mood, he did not speak again of the change of weather, and as speedily as ceremony would permit, I got up, made my bow, and went on deck. The appearance in the west was sullen enough, though merely with a faintness there that was unrelieved by any edging or shouldering outline of cloud. A few patches of vapour lay streaked along the sky, otherwise the heavens hovered in an unstained hollow, but of a faded, watery blue, unwholesome and with a sort of blindness of fog in it; and up in the north-east hung the sun, shorn of his rays, a squeezed yet uncompacted mass of dazzle, like as I have seen him show when setting in a belt of vapour that has not entirely hid him, and casting a wake as dim as burning oil. The swell had grown in weight even while we had been breaking our fast. There being not the faintest draught of air to steady the vessel--no, not so much as to put the most delicate curl of shadow upon the heads of the muddy-blue, grease-smooth, liquid roundings which came with a sulky brimming to the channels. She rolled with stupid heaviness, her sails rattling like a discharge from great ordnance, and a sort of song-like cries twanging out from the sharp fierce strains put upon the shrouds and backstays, and many noises in her hold. You would have thought that her huge round-tops and heavy furniture of spar and rigging would have given some regularity to her pendulous swaying: but the contrary was the case, her action being so jerky, abrupt, and unforegatherable by the legs, that walking was impossible. I passed the morning partly on deck, partly in the cabin, nearly all the while in Imogene's society, Vanderdecken's passionate mood being too vehement to suffer him to notice either me or my dearest. Indeed, I sought the cabin chiefly to remove myself from his sight, for as the weather darkened round his wrath mounted with it--visible in his tempestuous stridings, and above all, in the flaming and cursing eyes he would again and again level at the heavens; and I sometimes felt that nothing less than my life might be the forfeit of my even provoking his regard and constraining his attention to me in his present satanic posture of mind.