There were men in the chains. Every now and then their voices rang up from near the bows in that mournful kind of chant that none can forget who have ever heard it “And a half fi—ive.”
“And a quarter less six.” And so on. They had just come over an ugly bit of shoal water, and from the mast-head, where Harry himself—it was his watch—had gone to view the situation, he could notice that there were patches of the same kind of coral shoals almost everywhere around.
It was an ugly situation. He could not help wishing that the wind had continued but a little longer, or that it would again spring up from the same quarter. But there were the sails flapping sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, and taking desperate pulls and jerks at the sheets, causing the Bunting to kick about in a manner that was far from agreeable.
Harry was just about to order sail to be taken in, for he knew not in what direction the wind would come from.
He had already taken the liberty of rousing the sleeping engineer, and telling him to get up steam with all possible speed.
“Hands, shorten sail!”
“Ready about.”
For the wind seemed now commencing to blow from off the land.
He ran up to the maintop once more to take a view of the situation.
Heavens! what was coming yonder? Away on the horizon a long bank of snow-white fog or foam, high as poplar trees it seemed; and as he listened for a moment spellbound, he could hear a distant roar like that which breakers make on a sandy beach on a windless, frosty night in winter, only more continuous. It was the scourge of the Indian Ocean. It was the dreaded white squall.