By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polar
clothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian fur
cap on my head.
At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as though
the engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had a
ghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, but
the silence of their ghost.
Sometimes I would startle from sleep, horrified to the heart at some
sound of exploding iceberg, or bumping floe, noising far through that
white mystery of quietude, where the floes and bergs were as floating
tombs, and the world a liquid cemetery. Never could I describe the
strange Doom's-day shock with which such a sound would recall me from
far depths of chaos to recollection of myself: for often-times, both
waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which planet I was, nor in
which Age, but felt myself adrift in the great gulf of time and space
and circumstance, without bottom for my consciousness to stand upon; and
the world was all mirage and a new show to me; and the boundaries of
dream and waking lost.
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