At the moment when eight bells actually went, I was in the fo’cas’le, talking to four of the other watch.  Suddenly, away aft, I heard shouting, and then on the deck overhead, came the loud thudding of someone pomping with a capstan-bar.  Straightway, I turned and made a run for the port doorway, along with the four other men.  We rushed out through the doorway on to the deck.  It was getting dusk; but that did not hide from me a terrible and extraordinary sight.  All along the port rail there was a queer, undulating greyness, that moved downwards inboard, and spread over the decks.  As I looked, I found that I saw more clearly, in a most extraordinary way.  And, suddenly, all the moving greyness resolved into hundreds of strange men.  In the half-light, they looked unreal and impossible, as though there had come upon us the inhabitants of some fantastic dream-world.  My God!  I thought I was mad.  They swarmed in upon us in a great wave of murderous, living shadows.  From some of the men who must have been going aft for roll-call, there rose into the evening air a loud, awful shouting.

“Aloft!” yelled someone; but, as I looked aloft, I saw that the horrible things were swarming there in scores and scores.

“Jesus Christ—!” shrieked a man’s voice, cut short, and my glance dropped from aloft, to find two of the men who had come out from the fo’cas’le with me, rolling upon the deck.  They were two indistinguishable masses that writhed here and there across the planks.  The brutes fairly covered them.  From them, came muffled little shrieks and gasps; and there I stood, and with me were the other two men.  A man darted past us into the fo’cas’le, with two grey men on his back, and I heard them kill him.  The two men by me, ran suddenly across the fore hatch, and up the starboard ladder on to the fo’cas’le head.  Yet, almost in the same instant, I saw several of the grey men disappear up the other ladder.  From the fo’cas’le head above, I heard the two men commence to shout, and this died away into a loud scuffling.  At that, I turned to see whether I could get away.  I stared round, hopelessly; and then with two jumps, I was on the pigsty, and from there upon the top of the deckhouse.  I threw myself flat, and waited, breathlessly.

All at once, it seemed to me that it was darker than it had been the previous moment, and I raised my head, very cautiously.  I saw that the ship was enveloped in great billows of mist, and then, not six feet from me, I made out someone lying, face downwards.  It was Tammy.  I felt safer now that we were hidden by the mist, and I crawled to him.  He gave a quick gasp of terror when I touched him; but when he saw who it was, he started to sob like a little kid.

“Hush!” I said.  “For God’s sake be quiet!” But I need not have troubled; for the shrieks of the men being killed, down on the decks all around us, drowned every other sound.

I knelt up, and glanced round and then aloft.  Overhead, I could make out dimly the spars and sails, and now as I looked, I saw that the t’gallants and royals had been unloosed and were hanging in the buntlines.  Almost in the same moment, the terrible crying of the poor beggars about the decks, ceased; and there succeeded an awful silence, in which I could distinctly hear Tammy sobbing.  I reached out, and shook him.