vibrated through the metal rigging, and yet the sea rose with a heavy swell as though it felt the warnings of a coming tempest.
All at once, at about eleven o'clock, the moon burst brightly forth through a rift in the clouds, and the waves sparkled again as if illuminated by a submarine glimmer. I start up and look around me. Is it merely imagination? or do I really see a black speck floating on the dazzling whiteness of the waters, a speck that cannot be a rock, because it rises and falls with the heaving motion of the billows? But the moon once again becomes overclouded; the sea is darkened, and I return to my uneasy couch close to the larboard shrouds.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE WHALE-BOAT MISSING
December 6.—I must have fallen asleep for a few hours, when, at four o'clock in the morning, I was rudely aroused by the roaring of the wind, and could distinguish Curtis's voice as he shouted in the brief intervals between the heavy gusts.
I got up, and holding tightly to the purlin—for the waves made the masts tremble with their violence—I tried to look around and below me. The sea was literally raging beneath, and great masses of livid-looking foam were dashing between the masts, which were oscillating terrifically. It was still dark, and I could only faintly distinguish two figures in the stern, whom, by the sound of their voices, that I caught occasionally above the tumult, I made out to be Curtis and the boatswain.
Just at that moment a sailor, who had mounted to the main-top to do something to the rigging, passed close behind me.
"What's the matter? " I asked.
"The wind has changed," he answered, adding something which I could not hear distinctly, but which sounded like "dead against us."
Dead against us! then, thought I, the wind had shifted to the southwest, and my last night's forebodings had been correct.
