And then the thing struck. So violent was the blow that it seemed as if the boat might be lifted from the water and carried through space. The air was full of flying water—sheets of spray blown from the tops of the waves, while overhead a darkness almost like the night closed in. Rain came driving horizontally in sheets, and lightning flashed round half the horizon. It was impossible to see a quarter of a mile.
Mortimer looked at Evans whose eyes scarcely left the compass, and saw in his face alertness, steadiness, and strength; and the fear which such an overwhelming outburst of the fury of the elements had naturally aroused in him was effectually quelled.
Almost as quickly as it had come the black cloud blew over, leaving a sense of dazzling brightness by contrast, although the sky was still heavily clouded. For three or four minutes the wind blew with almost unabated fury, the little boat scudding bravely before it under her jib. Then the wind moderated enough to relax the tension, but still blew hard enough to make them glad of shortened sail.
“Eighty miles an hour, I’ll bet, during the height of that,” said Evans. “All of forty, still.”
And now the waves had become high and steep and short.
“We’re getting into that tide rip I spoke of; the water’s getting shoal. The sand’s so white it looks shoaler than it really is.”
Mortimer looked ahead and saw through the rain great whitecaps forming an almost solid line like the breakers on a beach, and in the troughs of the waves the white sand bottom gleamed alarmingly near.
“Lord! are we going into that?” he asked.
“She won’t touch, and the waves can’t hurt her. They may come aboard now and then, but they’ll drain right out through the cockpit scuppers. You might close the cabin hatch.”
The waves grew higher and steeper, and now they were in a mass of breaking whitecaps. Each wave lifted the little boat up, and with her nose deep down in the trough, she would dash forward with amazing speed till the wave broke all around her and she came to a stop in a smother of foam. Looking back, it often seemed as though the waves, towering high and curling over the stern, would swamp the boat completely, but each time the stern rose gracefully, and at most a few gallons of water would splash into the cockpit.