And again the sergeant's voice was heard, with a hundred other voices, appealing to a God whose mercy was surely turned away.
For a moaning sound tingled along the strand, and then silently, but with the speed of a cataract, the sea sank back from the shore.
It plucked half a hundred boats from their anchorages; it gripped them down into its trough. For full thirty seconds they fled upon this monstrous tide of a tideless sea, hull crashing against hull, mast beating against mast, a wrecked wilderness of spars and rigging, tangled, coiled, the froth, the scum, as it were, upon that mighty crest. And behind them went the Santa Margarita's dingy, with bound and free in equal helplessness.
Then, as if the sluice of some Cyclopean lock had been shut, the mighty mill-race halted and a mountain grew upon the face of the deep. Huge, black, awesome, it swung itself up, swelled higher and higher, hung through an æon-long moment of horror, and then rolled back whence it had come. And the menace of its coming left no tiniest coign of foothold for hope in its path. Irresistible and relentless it moved along to destroy every barrier of nature, every man-built obstacle with its might. Its foam-plumed crest roared over the quayside and the Marina five fathoms deep.
Like a chip upon the surface of a torrent which suddenly hastens to the brink of the cascade, the boat and its burden of lives was snatched along. The three who stood and gripped its gunwale saw the broad expanse of the Marina before them, saw it seem to sink as they themselves rose upon the flood, saw how they raced across it twenty feet above the level of its flags. And they saw more—saw it with eyes which seemed to sear their brains with anticipation, with despair.
This!
A long, irregular, deep-fronted row of dwellings, square to the sea, square to the reeling ridge of ocean which was sweeping upon them as the gust sweeps down upon the far-flung autumn leaves.
They called aloud in chorus; they challenged Fate with their despair. And Fate replied.
The waters reached the walls; the huge sheet of spray shot high into the night. But the dingy passed on uncrushed.
An alley opened before them—an alley through which they shot on the roaring tide into the square beyond, sank down as the dwindling waters sank and with their last effort of destruction reached, and were borne into an arched opening girt about with trees. And then that, in its turn, became a ruin of plaster and planks and stone. The wave completed what the earthquake had all too thoroughly begun. The roof and walls crashed down into a grim monument upon a living grave.