There was fascination, not at all surprising, about the great
glass lights in the Dipsey, and whenever a man was off duty he
was pretty sure to be at one of these windows if he could get
there. At first Mrs. Block was afraid to look out of any of
them. It made her blood creep, she said, to stare out into all
that solemn water. For the first two days, when she could get no
one to talk to her, she passed most of her time sitting in the
cabin, holding in one of her hands a dustbrush, and in the other
a farmer's almanac. She did not use the brush, nor did she read
the almanac, but they reminded her of home and the world which
was real.

But when she did make up her mind to look out of the windows, she
became greatly interested, especially at the bow, where she could
gaze out into the water illuminated by the long lane of light
thrown out by the search-light. Here she continually imagined
she saw things, and sometimes greatly startled the men on lookout
by her exclamations. Once she thought she saw a floating corpse,
but fortunately it was Sammy who was by her when she proclaimed
her discovery, and he did not believe in any such nonsense,
suggesting that it might have been some sort of a fish. After
that the idea of fish filled the mind of Mrs. Block, and she set
herself to work to search in an encyclopaedia which was on board
for descriptions of fishes which inhabited the depths of the
arctic seas. To meet a whale, she thought, would be very bad,
but then a whale is clumsy and soft; a sword-fish was what she
most dreaded. A sword-fish running his sword through one of the
glass windows, and perhaps coming in himself along with the water,
sent a chill down her back every time she thought about it and
talked about it.