"Do you know what I'm thinking of?" Michael yelled.
She shook her head, blinking in the spray.
"The Round Pond!" he yelled again.
"I can't imagine that even the Round Pond's really calm at present," she shouted back.
Suddenly astern there was a cry of despair that rose high above the howling of the wind; the tiller had broken, and immediately the prow of the caique, swerving away from the sky, drove straight for the shore. Two men leaped forward to cut the ropes of the jib, which flapped madly aloft; then it gave itself to the wind and danced before them till it was no more than a gull's wing against dark and mighty Samothrace.
The caique rocked alarmingly until the oars steadied her; the strength of the rowers endured long enough to clear the promontory, but, unfortunately, the expected shelter on the other side proved to be an illusion, and, though a new tiller had been provided by this time, it was impossible for the exhausted men to do their part. The caique began to ship water, so heavily, indeed, that the captain gave orders to run her ashore where the sand of a narrow cove glimmered between huge towers of rock. The beaching would have been effected safely had it not been for a sunken reef that ripped out the bottom of the caique, which crumpled up and shrieked her horror like a live, sentient thing. Sylvia found herself, after she had rolled in a dizzy switchback from the summit of one wave to another, clinging head downward to a slippery ledge of rock, her fingers in a mush of sea-anemones, her feet wedged in a crevice; then another wave lifted her off and she was swept over and over in green somersaults of foam, until there came a blow as from a hammer, a loud roaring, and silence.
When Sylvia recovered consciousness she was lying on a sandy slope with Michael's arms round her.
"Was I drowned?" she asked; then common sense added itself to mere consciousness and she began to laugh. "I don't mean actually, but nearly?"
"No, I think you hit your head rather a thump on the beach. You've only been lying here about twenty minutes."
"And Yanni and the captain and the crew?"