The gloom stole gradually into darkness as though some giant hand was warily drawing a sable curtain over our mastheads. Never did I watch the growth of a storm with such awe as now filled me. To my alarmed sight, the gathering seemed like an embodiment of the Curse in dreadful, swelling, livid vapours, whose dull hectic, whose sallow bronze glaring out of the murkiness, showed like the overflowing of the blue and scarlet and sunlight fires pent up in those teeming surcharged bosoms. My plain sense assured me that the tempest could not hold for this Death Ship the menace that would render its aspect terrifying to the mariner on board an earthly craft; yet it was impossible for my instincts as a seaman to accommodate themselves to the supernatural conditions which begirt me, and I found myself trembling for the safety of the ship when I discovered that the tempest was suffered to grow without an order being given to the men to shorten sail and prepare for it. I left Imogene and stepped furtively along the quarter-deck to command the poop, and saw Vanderdecken standing aft, surveying the storm with his arms folded, his chin depressed, and his face staring out ashenly against the gloom. I watched him for some minutes, but never once did he stir. Arents and Van Vogelaar were on the other side of the deck, leaning over the rail, gazing at God knows what, but never speaking as I could be sure in the silence that rested upon the ship. The men hung about in groups forward; mere cunningly devised shapes of human beings without the faintest stir of restlessness among them. Many of them smoked, and the pale wreaths went from their paler lips into the air straight as staffs. "Imogene, look at that sky!" I whispered, "did mortal ever behold the like of it?" 'Twas two o'clock; a tempest-coloured twilight, in which the sails to the flattened swell swayed like visionary wings grown languid with long flight, and feebly hovering and almost noiselessly beating over the ship; out of the gloom over the side came now and again the yearning moan of water, foamlessly laving the bends and run of the vessel; in each death-like pause you heard the silence tingling in the air with the low phantasmal muttering of a weltering sea, a sound as of an imagination of unreal breakers upon a faery shore.