To put his helm to starboard was so much Arabic to Max, but he had turned the handle in one direction, and he was going wrong, so he felt that to turn it the other way must be right. Pressing hard, then, he found that what he did had the effect of turning the boat half round, and making it go more slowly and diagonally in the direction from which the wind blew, and somewhat more toward the shelf where his friends were imprisoned, so that he could see them waving their caps, as moment by moment they seemed more distant.
And now, for the first time, as he caught sight of a pile of ruins far away to his right, he realised that he had been going away from Dunroe, which lay to the south, while now he was sailing south-east; and his spirits rose as he felt that he must be right in trying to reach that castle, which he remembered as being one that Kenneth had pointed out.
He turned his head again in the direction of the shelf, and there, high up, were the two boys, still waving their caps, either by way of encouragement or to try and give him advice by signs. But he could not tell which, neither could he signal in turn, for both hands were full; so, setting his teeth, and with a wonderful feeling of exhilaration and excitement, at which he was surprised, he devoted himself to his task.
Chapter Seventeen.
A Terrible Journey.
Bailing a boat is like most other things, it has to be learned, and it is a puzzling thing to grasp the meaning of the way in which it seems to act.
To sit and hold the rudder and go right away with the wind dead astern is not so difficult, but to try and sail a boat with the wind almost in your teeth, is, at the first time of asking, rather a strain upon the unaccustomed mind. The first thing which Max discovered was that, as soon as the sail was up, the boat seemed to try to take, so to speak, the bit in its teeth and run off to the north; the next, that he held in the tiller whip, spur, reins, everything for governing this strangely-mobile creature, and at the hint from Kenneth he had changed its course.
But now, as it could not go north, the boat seemed to be trying to go due east, and, with the sail well filled and careening over, she literally rushed through the water, which sparkled in her wake.