midnight
* * * * * When I needed food or sleep , the ship slept , too : when I awoke , she continued her way . Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel , overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea , till my knees would give , and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not contrived , rather delicate steering being often required among the floes and bergs . 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 . Well , the weather was most fair all the time , and the sea like a pond .