"Hark!" I exclaimed, "it is upon us!" and as I spoke the gale smote us like a bolt from heaven, falling upon us with a long and frightful scream and amid a volley of lightning that made the sky a blinding purple dazzle from sea-line to sea-line. I held with both hands to one side of the frame of the window, and Imogene, half-swooning with terror, lay against me, nothing but my body saving her from being dashed against the side of the cabin. Such was the sharpness of the angle to which the first frenzy of the liberated hurricane heeled the vessel, that for some minutes I veritably believed she was foundering. The ocean boiled in a flat plain of froth, and the ship lay steady upon the enraged whiteness, with the rail of her bulwarks under, and you heard amid the seething and shrill shrieking of the wind, the sound of the water pouring on to her decks over the upper and quarter-deck and forecastle-rails, as the cataract thunders, coiling with a pure head, over the edge of some rocky abrupt. If I had opened the door--if indeed I could have taken action on that violent headlong steep of deck--it would have merely been to drown the cabin and Imogene and myself. There was nothing to be done but attend the issue, and for several minutes, I say, I stood holding on, my dearest clasping me and so supporting herself, scarce knowing whether the vessel was under water or not, unable to speak for the horrible clamour without, the lightning continuously holding the fabric visible through the window in its mani-coloured blaze, and the enduring steadiness of the hull upon the flat foam putting a terror into the situation you would not have remarked in her labouring in a hollow sea. Presently, to my great joy, I perceived that she was recovering her upright posture. They had succeeded in getting her to pay off, and after a little, giving her tall stem to the gale, she went before it as upright as a church, the water on her decks pouring away overboard, the piercing fury of the wind robbed to the extent of the velocity with which the vessel drove, and no other sound rising up off the sea but the amazing hissing of foam. "Curse or no Curse," said I, "Vanderdecken knows his business as a sailor, and call me a Dutchman if here has not been a noble stroke of seamanship!" "Wy zyn al Verdomd!" said the parrot. CHAPTER VI. WE SPRING A LEAK.