midnight
Every blow of the black and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble back to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale . The frozen body was not taller than our mastheads , yet it showed like a mountain hanging over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow , leaving us staring upwards out of the instant 's stagnation of the trough with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes . It put a kind of film of faint light outside the lines of its own shape , and this served to magnify it , and it showed spectrally in the darkness as though it reflected some visionary light that came neither from the sea nor the sky . These points I recollect ; likewise the maddening and maddened motion of our vessel , sliding towards it down one midnight declivity to another . All other features were swallowed up in the agony of the time . One monstrous swing the brig gave , like to some doomed creature 's last delirious struggle ; the bowsprit caught the ice and snapped with the noise of a great tree crackling in fire . I could hear the masts breaking overhead -- the crash and blows of spars and yards torn down and striking the hull ; above all the grating of the vessel , that was now head on to the sea and swept by the billows , broadside on , along the sharp and murderous projections .