Read "The Death Ship, Volume Ii" by W. Clark Russell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was like coming out of a sepulchre to step from that forecastle on deck where the glorious sun was and the swaying shadows, and where the blue wind gushed in a soft breathing over the bulwark-rails, with weight enough in it to hold the canvas stirless, and to raise a gentle hissing alongside like the seething of champagne. I spied Vanderdecken on the poop and near him Imogene, so I hastened aft to greet the girl and salute the great bearded figure that nobly towered beside her. She looked fragrant and sweet as a white rose in the dewy morn, wore a straw hat turned up on one side and looped to stay there with a parti-coloured rosette, and though this riband was faded with age and the straw yellow and dull through keeping, the gear did suit her beauty most divinely, and I could have knelt and kissed her hand, so complete a Princess did she appear in the royal perfections of her countenance and shape.
To turn from the sparkle of her violet eye, the rosiness of her lip, the life that teemed in the expression of her face, like a blushing light shining through fragile porcelain, to turn from her to the great silent figure near her, with piercing gaze directed over the taffrail, his beard trembling to the down-rush of air from the mizzen, was to obtain a proper contrast to enable you to realise in the aspect of that amazing person the terrible conditions of his existence and the enormous significance of his sentence.