mast-downward

Updated: May 7, 2025

There was a brigantine with all her courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails, and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and the sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent, an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality the inner mind and meaning of Azrael than aught that I could have conceived: for all, as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.

M. P. (Matthew Phipps) Shiel - The Purple Cloud