"He had the first watch. It was one of those typical Pacific nights—a velvet sky, a smooth sea, the air somehow expressing the character of an ocean illimitable and magnificent, an ocean that spreads like the floor of the universe. After the captain had gone below for the night, Devereux cast his imagination adrift to follow those birds, to see the land again. What could their visit have meant? Was there any land nearer than the Marquesas—perhaps an uninhabited island? He promised himself a careful survey of the chart when he went below at midnight.... He'd been thinking in this desultory fashion some time, lost in the dreams of night watches, when a sharp cry from forward struck him like a knife flying through the darkness.
"You know those single cries on shipboard, in the dead of night—cries of warning, of apprehension, of impending danger. The heart stops for a moment at the sound. Then a thousand possibilities crowd into the mind at once, a thousand processes of thought leap into action. There can be no indecision; moments are priceless. And there must be no mistake.
"The cry met him a second time as he passed the mizzen rigging, running forward. 'Breakers ahead!' Instinctively, he shouted the order over his shoulder as he ran.
"'Put the helm down! Hard down! Hard down!'
"But it was too late to save her. He told me that he paused at the break of the poop, listening, and in a sudden hush that went over the ship, heard distinctly a low sucking sound under the bows—the horrible gasping of water over rocks awash. He clung to the rail, cowed by the only fear a sailor knows. At that moment, she struck heavily, and stood still. She had been making about five knots, enough to give her plenty of momentum. The shock was terrific: some of the top-hamper crashed to the deck, and the voices of men suddenly broke out in screams of terror. The ship rose a little by the head, seemed to draw back, and surged forward again with a dull, rending, sickening plunge.
"But what's the need to rehearse the details of that oldest tragedy of the sea? There was time enough for them to get out the boats, time enough, even, to fully provision them—and that's more than some have been allowed. But the ship was dead and done for. Her whole bow must have been stove in under water. Five minutes after they pushed clear of her, she slumped like a rock, and they lost her in the darkness. A whirlpool of foam showed for a while on the surface of the black water. Then that, too, faded; and the wide, open Pacific received them in their three boats as frail as cockle-shells, and the velvet night covered it all.
"The captain commanded the longboat, the second mate and Devereux had a whaleboat apiece. Devereux's was the smallest; his crew consisted of six men besides himself. The boats drew together on the quiet water for a consultation. A deep stillness invested the place, the stillness of a lofty cavern, of an empty world; and somewhere off in the gloom that awful sucking sound went on, now loud, now dying out to a faint echo, like a demon chuckling over human disaster.
"All night they played hide-and-seek with that demon in the darkness. The breeze fell off, and after a while it grew flat calm. At times the voice of the reef was hoarse and low and languid; at times it purred and bubbled energetically; at times it would be silent so long that they'd lean over the gunwale to listen, thinking they had lost it—when unexpectedly it would snarl out again, close at hand. In the middle of the night they did seem to be really losing the sound, and were afraid they'd drifted from the vicinity; they bent to the oars rather aimlessly, for no one could judge the exact direction, and before they knew it were almost running afoul of the hideous thing. Some of the men swore that the sound moved on the water; this seemed plausible, for it was to be supposed that the reef extended a considerable distance, yet the notion nevertheless gave rise to a vague superstitious fear. Either it moved, or they were surrounded by a nest of reefs—one was about as bad as the other. Devereux said it was a night to drive a nervous man crazy, a night that they began to think would never end.
"When dawn came at last, they looked about them and saw nothing at all—nothing but an unbroken horizon, a boundless ocean, a few spars floating idly in the midst of a great calm, and a little dark dot like a pimple on the face of the waters, just in front of the rising sun.
"They rowed toward this pimple on the surface. It opened and closed with the sucking motion of a loose mouth, and between the monstrous flickering lips of water a point of rock protruded, black and swollen like the tongue of a drowned man. It seemed impossible that this solitary rock had made all the commotion of the night, had invested them as if with an army of breakers; yet there was absolutely nothing else in sight—the rest had been imagination.