midnight
Old as Pizarro , this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new ; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay ; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions . I know that , to the common apprehension , this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible ; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon , especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality . What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples . First : The mariner , when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands , if by night he hear the roar of breakers , starts to vigilance , and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties ; but under precisely similar circumstances , let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness -- as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him , then he feels a silent , superstitious dread ; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost ; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings ; heart and helm they both go down ; he never rests till blue water is under him again . Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee , `` Sir , it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks , as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me ? '' Second : To the native Indian of Peru , the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread , except , perhaps , in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes , and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes . Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West , who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow , no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness .