And gazed upon the billowy mount above;
Till up that mountain swinging with the gale,
We view'd the horrors of the watery vale!"
Crabbe.
A dark stormy December night had been followed by a gloomy morning, a heavy gale had been blowing for some hours from the north-east, and thick drifting snow-squalls still further threw heavy shadows over the sea, and added greatly to the perils of the dangerous navigation around the Goodwin.
The men on Ramsgate pier said to each other, "It is likely weather." Likely for disaster and for the need of their services; they therefore keep a careful watch, but the snow and drifting fog-clouds shut out the Goodwin Sands and the light-vessels from their view, and so the men can only wait on, speculating upon the possibility of some unseen tragedy being worked out amid the darkness and the wrath of waters that surround the Goodwin.
It is now after breakfast-time, about nine o'clock, the weather is too bad for much ordinary work to be going on, and so a large number of boatmen assemble in the look-out houses and at the head of the pier watching the storm.
Many are the spy-glasses which are every now and then pointed seaward, scanning any break in the storm-drift; three or four men are at the end of the pier by the watch-house; one of them fancies that he can make out a dark line 'mid the grey gloom; he watches carefully, a sheet of fog lifts for a moment; "Yes, there is! I see a ship on the Goodwin!"
"Where? Where?" and another man looks at the direction of his spy-glass, and points his own the same way. No; he can see nothing; and the man himself can now see nothing; it was just a glimpse, that was all, and the cloud closed in upon the Sands and wrapt them in darkness again.
"But are you positive you saw anything?" they ask the man.