On the third night, dating from the beginning of our adventure, it fell to me to take the middle watch; and when I went on deck at midnight I still found the weather everything that could be desired, except that the wind was perceptibly lighter than it had been when I turned in some four hours earlier. This change, Saunders informed me, had been in progress during almost the whole of his watch; but I did not think—nor did he—that it portended any very important alteration in the weather, for the sky was perfectly clear, and the stars shone brilliantly. The utmost that I anticipated was a possible shift of wind; which, however, would be no great matter, since it was just as likely to be in our favour as against us. We stood for a few minutes discussing probabilities, and then Saunders bade me good night and went below.
For nearly two hours I stood at the wheel, holding the ship to her course with ever-increasing difficulty; for the wind still continued to drop until we scarcely had steerage-way. Then, with a final sigh the breeze died away altogether, the topsails hung limp and dew-saturated from the yards, the fore topmast staysail sheet drooped amidships, and the Mercury swung broadside-on to the scarcely perceptible swell.
Abandoning the now useless wheel, I walked forward to the skylight—in which the cabin lamp, turned low, burned dimly—and had a look at the barometer. It was about a tenth lower than when I had last looked at it, two hours earlier, and that might possibly mean an impending change of weather; but if so, the heavens showed no sign of it thus far, for the sky was still clear as crystal, the stars beamed down with undiminished radiance out of the immeasurable depths of the blue-black vault overhead, and the swell was perceptibly flattening. Then I looked at the clock, which, as is usual at sea, was set every day by the sun. It wanted five minutes to two; I therefore had still two hours of my watch to stand; and, to stave off a certain feeling of drowsiness that was insidiously taking possession of me, I went down on to the main deck and proceeded to pace to and fro in the waist, satisfied that I might walk there as long as I pleased without disturbing the rest of my companions, each of whom occupied a cabin under the poop.
As I thoughtfully walked fore and aft between the main and fore rigging, instinctively treading lightly in sympathy with the profound silence of the night, my imagination carried me back to the island, and I was endeavouring to picture to myself Wilde’s rage and disgust upon making the discovery that the ship had prematurely gone to sea, taking with her the girl that he had fully determined to marry, when a low sound, like the muttering of far-distant thunder, awoke me out of my reverie. I sprang up on the poop and flung a hasty glance around the horizon to see if I could anywhere catch the glimmer of distant lightning, thinking that possibly a squall might be brewing. Far away to the northward I did indeed distinctly see what appeared to be the reflection in the sky of certain ruddy flashes, but they hardly looked to me like lightning, or, at all events, like the kind of lightning which I had been accustomed to see.
Meanwhile the low, muttering sound had not died away, as thunder does; on the contrary, it was not only continuous but was steadily growing; in volume with amazing rapidity, proceeding apparently from the direction of those curious ruddy flashes, which were also growing stronger, even as I stood staring and wondering what the phenomenon might mean. As the sound steadily increased so did its resemblance to thunder—or the rapid firing of heavy guns—become more pronounced, a distinct booming, like that of frequent heavy explosions, making itself heard in the midst of the continuous rumble—which seemed to me to be drawing nearer with frightful rapidity. Then, as I still gazed in perplexity toward the spot from which this mysterious and terrifying sound seemed to emanate, I caught the gleam of white water on the northern horizon; and no longer doubting that a heavy squall—of a character quite unknown to me, and perhaps peculiar to those waters—was about to burst upon us, I dashed down the poop ladder and into the cabin, uttered one yell of: “All hands on deck!” and then dashed out again on to the main deck, springing first to the main topsail halyards and letting them run, and then doing the same by the fore.
By the time that I had cast off the fore topsail halyards, Gurney and Saunders, alarmed by my cry, were out on deck, while in the doorway of the cabin stood Grace Hartley with a wrap of some sort thrown over her shoulders.
“What is it, Mr Troubridge—what, in the name of all that is terrible, is happening?” demanded Gurney, gazing about him in amazement.
“Man the reef tackles, for your lives!” I shouted. “Don’t you hear the squall thundering down upon us? If we are not lively it will whip the masts out of her—indeed I am not sure but it will in any case! Here we are; lay hold, and drag—Grace, go back to your cabin—this is no place for you!”
Gurney sprang to one of the reef tackles, while Saunders and I dragged at the other, yelling our “Yo ho’s!” as we did so. Meanwhile the awful booming and crashing sounds seemed to be sweeping down toward us on the wings of the squall, and so heavy had they by this time become that we could actually feel the ship trembling with the reverberation of them. The next second that frightful combination of rumbling and crashing sounds was all about us, mingled now with the hoarse roar of heavily breaking water; the ship suddenly began to pitch and roll with a violence which deprived us of all power to do anything more than just cling for our lives to the nearest object that we could lay hold of; the sea all about us suddenly broke into a mad turmoil of raging waters, white with the glare of phosphorescence, leaping, foaming, and swirling hither and thither with appalling violence; huge masses of water flung themselves high in the air and crashed in over our bulwarks, forward, aft, and amidships, all at the same moment, deluging our decks and threatening to sweep us overboard; and in the midst of it all we felt a succession of violent shocks, as though the ship were being swept over a reef by a violent tide race. But there was no wind; not a breath, save such slight baffling draughts as were probably created by the violent motion of the sea around us.
Those grating, hammering shocks lasted perhaps half a minute, then they suddenly ceased; the deep rumbling, crashing sound swept past us away down to the southward, and gradually died away; the roar of broken water changed its note and became the seething hiss of an innumerable multitude of streams rushing over a rocky bed and cascading from one level to the other; and the ship once more floated motionless, or nearly so. And throughout the whole of this soul-shaking experience the stars beamed calmly down upon us with undimmed splendour.