FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT.
Again was the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness.
The _Matutina_, escaped from the Caskets, sank and rose from billow to
billow. A respite, but in chaos.
Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave,
she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea. She scarcely pitched at
all--a terrible symptom of a ship’s distress. Wrecks merely roll.
Pitching is a convulsion of the strife. The helm alone can turn a vessel
to the wind.
In storms, and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night
end by melting into amalgamation, resolving into nothing but a smoke.
Mists, whirlwinds, gales, motion in all directions, no basis, no
shelter, no stop. Constant recommencement, one gulf succeeding another.
No horizon visible; intense blackness for background. Through all these
the hooker drifted.
To have got free of the Caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory
for the shipwrecked men; but it was a victory which left them in stupor.
They had raised no cheer: at sea such an imprudence is not repeated
twice. To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead,
would have been too serious a jest.
The repulse of the rock was an impossibility achieved. They were
petrified by it. By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are
the insubmergable mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete
but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of
hope is seen in its depths. These poor wretches were ready to
acknowledge to themselves that they were saved. It was on their lips.
But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness.
On the port bow arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of
mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss.
They watched it open-mouthed.
The storm was driving them towards it.
They knew not what it was. It was the Ortach rock.