Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

"Smack into the Bay of Monterey, between the town and Point Pinos.'

"Can I do anything?"

"Do just what you've got in hand. Take care of the lady. See that she gets into the biggest boat—if we try the boats."

Clara overheard, gave the skipper a kind look, and said, "Thank you, captain."

"You're fit to be capm of a liner, miss," returned the sailor. "You're one of the best sort."

For some time longer, while waiting for the final catastrophe, nothing was done but to hold fast and gaze. The voyagers were like condemned men who are preceded, followed, accompanied, jostled, and hurried to the place of death by a vindictive people. The giants of the sea were coming in multitudes to this execution which they had ordained; all the windward ocean was full of rising and falling billows, which seemed to trample one another down in their savage haste. There was no mercy in the formless faces which grimaced around the doomed ones, nor in the tempestuous voices which deafened them with threatenings and insult. The breakers seemed to signal to each other; they were cruelly eloquent with menacing gestures. There was but one sentence among them, and that sentence was a thousand times repeated, and it was always DEATH.

To paint the shifting sublimity of the tempest is as difficult as it was to paint the steadfast sublimity of the Great Cañon. The waves were in furious movement, continual change, and almost incessant death. They destroyed themselves and each other by their violence. Scarcely did one become eminent before it was torn to pieces by its comrades, or perished of its own rage. They were like barbarous hordes, exterminating one another or falling into dissolution, while devastating everything in their course.

There was a frantic revelry, an indescribable pandemonium of transformations. Lofty plumes of foam fell into hoary, flattened sheets; curling and howling cataracts became suddenly deep hollows. The indigo slopes were marbled with white, but not one of these mottlings retained the same shape for an instant; it was broad, deep, and creamy when the eye first beheld it; in the next breath it was waving, shallow, and narrow; in the next it was gone. A thousand eddies, whirls, and ebullitions of all magnitudes appeared only to disappear. Great and little jets of froth struggled from the agitated centres toward the surface, and never reached it. Every one of the hundred waves which made up each billow rapidly tossed and wallowed itself to death.

Yet there was no diminution in the spectacle, no relaxation in the combat. In the place of what vanished there was immediately something else. Out of the quick grave of one surge rose the white plume of another. Marbling followed marbling, and cataract overstrode cataract. Even to their bases the oceanic ranges and peaks were full of power, activity, and, as it were, explosions. It seemed as if endless multitudes of transformations boiled up through them from their abodes in sea-deep caves. There was no exhausting this reproductiveness of form and power. At every glance a thousand worlds of waters had perished, and a thousand worlds of waters had been created. And all these worlds, the new even more than the old, were full of malignity toward the wreck, and bent on its destruction.

The wind, though invisible, was not less wonderful. It surpassed the ocean in strength, for it chased, gashed, and deformed the ocean. It inflicted upon it countless wounds, slashing fresh ones as fast as others healed. It not only tore off the hoary scalps of the billows and flung them through the air, but it wrenched out and hurled large masses of water, scattering them in rain and mist, the blood of the sea. Now and then it made all the air dense with spray, causing the Pacific to resemble the Sahara in a simoom. At other times it levelled the tops of scores of waves at once, crushing and kneading them by the immense force that lay in its swiftness.