midnight
Yet now and again a little wind would rise and blow across the sea , and where it met the weed , there would come a low , damp rustling , so that I could hear the passage of it for no little time after the calm had come once more all about us . Now it is a strange thing that I , who had slept amid the noise of the past days , should find sleeplessness amid so much calm ; yet so it was , and presently I took the steering oar , proposing that the rest should sleep , and to this the bo ` sun agreed , first warning me , however , most particularly to have care that I kept the boat off the weed -LRB- for we had still a little way on us -RRB- , and , further , to call him should anything unforeseen occur . And after that , almost immediately he fell asleep , as indeed did the most of the men . From the time that I relieved the bo ` sun , until midnight , I sat upon the gunnel of the boat , with the steering oar under my arm , and watched and listened , most full of a sense of the strangeness of the seas into which we had come . It is true that I had heard tell of seas choked up with weed -- seas that were full of stagnation , having no tides ; but I had not thought to come upon such an one in my wanderings ; having , indeed , set down such tales as being bred of imagination , and without reality in fact . Then , a little before the dawn , and when the sea was yet full of darkness , I was greatly startled to hear a prodigious splash amid the weed , mayhaps at a distance of some hundred yards from the boat . Then , as I stood full of alertness , and knowing not what the next moment might bring forth , there came to me across the immense waste of weed , a long , mournful cry , and then again the silence .