Neither Vanderdecken nor his mate came below. Nothing could better have illustrated their ignorance of their true state than the anxieties which held them to the deck in the heart of that raging wind. Their solicitude might indeed deserve another name for the impious passions which informed it, yet it had a character sailorly enough to make it intelligible to human sympathy, and 'twas truly soul-subduing to sit in that cabin and hear the uproar of the tormented waters without, the outcry in the rigging, the straining and groaning below, and think of those men--of Vanderdecken, at all events--watching his ship as though Batavia were but six weeks distant and Amsterdam a certain port presently. At half-past nine Imogene withdrew. I led her to her cabin door, tenderly kissed her, then returning called for a cup of spirits and water and went to my sleeping place. I thought to have stayed a minute on deck to look about me, but the wind came with so much fury of wet in it that, having no mind to turn in with drenched clothes, I hastily raised the hatch and dropped below. I believe I lay awake the greater part of the night. My memory is not clear owing to the confusion my brain was in. It was not only a feeling akin to conviction that my fate was sealed, that my dearest and I were never to be rescued nor suffered to deliver ourselves from this Death Ship, though to be sure such apprehensions, so keen and fierce, might have caused a stouter mind than mine to fall distraught, the movements of the ship were so excessive, being very high, light and broad, and the seas so extraordinarily hollow, that, without disordering me with sickness, they wrought an alarming giddiness in me, and I lay as one in a sort of fit. In some such condition as this I languished, I believe, through the greater part of the night, but contrived to snatch sleep enough to refresh me, so that when I awoke I felt better, the dizziness gone and with it something of the distress of mind. The action of the ship showed that the gale was considerably abated, but I had no sooner my senses than I took notice of an unusual sound, like a slow and measured beating in the ship, as though some stout fellow with a heavy mallet regularly struck a hollow object in the hold. This excited my curiosity, and I went on deck. The moment my head was through the hatch I saw what produced the noise. The men were pumping. There was but one pump seemingly that would work, and this four seamen were plying, the water gushing freely from the pipe and washing away overboard through the scuppers.