With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in that five minutes’ interval:  she was painted a dull and cholera yellow, like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows under the line where the yellow ceased:  the ensign at her main I made out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere.  All about her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the low sun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to a smaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to a homogeneous band of livid silver.

The double speed of the Boreal and the other, hastening opposite ways, must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was accomplished in certainly less than five minutes:  yet into that time I crowded years of life.  I was shouting passionately at her, my eyes starting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone, loud and urgent.  For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign of seeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, with steadfast run.  I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense of relation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can only remember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by the fiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing high and madly:  for I was crying:  ’Hi!  Bravo!  Why don’t you stop? Madmen!  I have been to the Pole!’

That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils.  She was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing.  I had a glimpse of decks piled thick with her festered dead.

In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-corner caught the word Yaroslav, as I bent over the rail to retch and cough and vomit at her.  She was a horrid thing.

This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical or sub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead:  for all the bodies which I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give out a certain perfume of the peach.  She was evidently one of those many ships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yet retained their old steam-funnels, &c., in case of emergency:  for air, I believe, was still looked at askance by several builders, on account of the terrible accidents which it sometimes caused.  The Boreal herself is a similar instance of both motors.  This vessel, the Yaroslav, must have been left with working engines when her crew were overtaken by death, and, her air-tanks being still unexhausted, must have been ranging the ocean with impunity ever since, during I knew not how many months, or, it might be, years.