tempest, then vanishing like a burning shape, eclipsed and revealed by the speeding of sooty vapours. Amid these fierce swift shinings I would catch sight of the towering form of Vanderdecken standing at the mizzen-rigging, one hand on a shroud or backstay, sloping his figure against the tempest and his beard blown straight out before him. The others being abaft the little house I could not see. The scene now did indeed astonishingly realise the doubtful traditions which depicture the Flying Dutchman perpetually sailing amid storm. Since I had been on board I had viewed her in many conditions of weather; but though her supernatural qualities and characteristics best appeared when they stole out to the faint, waving silver of the moonshine trembling along the oil-like blackness of a midnight calm, yet she could never be more impressive than when, as she was now, fleeing like a witch driven mad by pursuing demons, whose numbers darkened the heavens, the lightning streaming about her like ordnance in Titanic hands fired to bring her to, all her rigging in a scream as she ran, showing in the spaces of dusk betwixt the flashes a great, black, phantasmal shape upon the floor of ringing and frenzied whiteness which the tempest swept along with her, and which broke not therefore in the lightest curl from her stern, nor yielded a hand's-breadth of wake. She was flying dead into the east, and every minute her keel passed over as many fathoms of sea as would take her hours of plying to recover. I frequently directed my eyes at Vanderdecken, suspecting his wrath, and prepared for a tragical exhibition, whose furiousness should be in awful correspondence with this insanity of sea and sky, but had the life been struck out of him as he stood there his posture could not have been more fixed and unmoving.