I cannot believe that any fantastic vision was ever wilder, stranger, more impressive than the picture offered by the Death Ship when her men went to work to snug her down. Their mechanically-moving shapes hauling upon the ropes, running like shadows along the decks, vanishing in the sullen, swarming thickness as they mounted the shrouds, every man as silent as a spectre; the fitful trembling out of the whole vessel to the white and green and violet glimmer of the yet distant lightning; the dark sea dimly glancing into a kind of light, wan and indeterminable as the sheen of stars in polished steel, under the play of those western glitterings; the blackness overhead now settled down to the eastern seaboard, over the horizon of which there yet hovered a streak of dusty green--it was a spectacle to need the hand of Dante or Milton. Compar'd to these storms, Death is but a qualm, Hell somewhat lightsome, the Bermudas calm; Darkness, Light's eldest brother, his birthright Claims o'er the World! It was as black as night. What the men were about, with what dispatch they worked, it was impossible to see. No songs or cries came from them to enable me to guess their movements. If ever Imogene and I exchanged a word it was in a whisper, so heart subduing was the darkness and the horrible element of suspense and uncertainty in it. I had her close to the cabin-front under the poop, ready for the shelter of it at the outburst. Ten minutes went by, and then it seemed to me as if a deeper shade yet had penetrated the darkness. Suddenly, I heard a far-off humming noise, a kind of growling sound, not to be likened to thunder, though you seemed to catch the note of that too in the multitudinous crying. It was as if the denizens of a thousand forests were flying before the roaring of a tornado among the trees, every savage beast raising its own savage cry as it went, the whole uproar so remote as to resemble a mountain's reverberation of the horrible clamour leagues and leagues distant inland. "What is that?" cried Imogene.