This strange sickness (as hath been said) I then set down to no more than confinement and my unwholesome situation, in the which supposition I was very far beside the mark, as you shall hear. For there now befell a thing that roused me from my apathy once and for all, and thereby saved me from miserably perishing and others with me, and the manner of it thus: On a time as I lay 'twixt sleep and wake, my glance (and for no reason in the world) chanced upon that knot-hole in the opposite bulkhead, the which (as already told) I had wrought into the likeness of a great eye. Now, as I stared at it, the thing seemed, all at once, to grow instinct with life and to stare back at me. I continued to view it (dully enough) until little by little I became aware of something strange about it, and then as I watched this (that was no more than a knot-hole) the thing winked at me. Thinking this but some wild fancy or a trick of the light I lay still, watching it beneath my lowered lids, and thus I suddenly caught the glitter of the thing as it moved and knew it for a very bright, human eye that watched me through the knot-hole. Now this may seem a very small matter in the telling, but to me at that moment (overwrought by my long sojourn in the dark) it was vastly otherwise.
For maybe a full minute the eye stared at me, fixed and motionless and with a piercing intensity, then suddenly was gone, and I lying there, my flesh a-tingle, my heart quick-beating in a strange terror, so that I marvelled to find myself so shaken. Leaping up in sudden fierce anger I wrenched open the door and rushed forth, only to fall headlong over some obstacle; and lying there bruised and dazed heard the soft thud and scamper of rats in the dark hard by. So I got me back to my bunk, and lying there fell to a gloomy reflection. And the more I thought, the fiercer grew my anger that any should dare so to spy upon me.
Thus it was in one of my blackest humours that Godby found me when, having set down the victuals he had brought, he closed the crazy door and seated himself on the cask that served me as chair, and bent to peer at me where I lay.
"Mart'n," said he, speaking almost in a whisper, "be ye awake at last?" For answer I cursed him heartily. "Avast, pal!" says he shaking his head, "look'ee, Mart'n, 'tis in my mind the devil's aboard this ship."