The
petroleum-launch was washed from the davits; down at one time to 40 deg.
below zero sank the thermometer; while a high aurora was whiffed into a
dishevelled chaos of hues, resembling the smeared palette of some
turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim,
and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and
distraction. I, for the first time, was sick.
It was with a dizzy brain, therefore, that I went off watch to my bunk.
Soon, indeed, I fell asleep: but the rolls and shocks of the ship,
combined with the heavy Greenland anorak which I had on, and the state
of my body, together produced a fearful nightmare, in which I was
conscious of a vain struggle to move, a vain fight for breath, for the
sleeping-bag turned to an iceberg on my bosom. Of Clodagh was my gasping
dream. I dreamed that she let fall, drop by drop, a liquid, coloured
like pomegranate-seeds, into a glass of water; and she presented the
glass to Peters. The draught, I knew, was poisonous as death: and in a
last effort to break the bands of that dark slumber, I was conscious, as
I jerked myself upright, of screaming aloud:
'Clodagh! Clodagh! _Spare the man.
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