Once with the sea fair upon the bow, the ancient structure rose as buoyantly as a wooden castle to the heave of the mighty surge, for all her labouring with full decks and the veiling of her by clouds and storms of spray. But had her situation looked to be one of frightful and imminent peril, I must by this time have viewed it with unconcern. The sense of the Curse that held the ship vital was strong in me. Out of the first terrific blast of the hurricane 'twas odds if the newest and stoutest ship could have emerged without damage, supposing she had not been sunk outright; yet did this vessel survive that fearful outfly, aged as she was. Not a yarn of her old ropes broken, nor a spar nor yard, whose rottenness caused them to glow in the dark, sprung or strained; more staunchly than could have been possible to her, even in the hour of her launch, did she breast the great black seas which swept her to their mountain-tops with yelling rigging and masts aslant, to hurl her a breathless moment afterwards into stagnant valleys, echoing the thunder of the gale that touched not their depths. I quitted the deck and returned to Imogene in the cabin. The lighted lamp swung wildly, and though the uproar of the tempest was muffled below, yet the noise of straining was so great that I had to put my lips close to my dear girl's ear to make myself heard. I gave her a description of the sea, acquainted her with the posture in which the ship lay, and told her that the incredible violence of the storm was promise enough that it would not endure; though it was horrible to think of the miles we had been forced to run into the eastwards, and of the leagues off our course the drift of the ship, even in twelve hours, would compel us to measure. Prins came to inquire if we would eat. We answered "No." That evening was the most dismal I had ever spent in the accursed ship. I held my sweetheart's hand, and speech being, as I have said, as good as impossible, I afflicted myself with a thousand miserable thoughts and dark and ugly fancies. Great heaven! With what loathing did I regard the sickly mask of the ship's side, the gloomy ovals, the ghastly revelry of the lantern's colours flashing to the prodigious swinging of the tempest-tossed fabric! And from time to time the parrot, affrighted by the noises and by the dashing of her cage against the bulkhead, burst suddenly out with her horrid croak of "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"