The cries of the terror-stricken sea-birds, as they wandered on the still and suffocating air, with even instinct failing to lead them to their resting place on the shore, sounded hoarse and ominous to the ear.
Not a sound was heard on board the schooner, except the creaks of the straining cordage, as the vessel violently and madly plunged.
Now, like molten lead, the rain began to fall in large, heavy, and leisurely drops. Then distant sounds, like the groans of a labouring world, when earthquakes shake it to its base, were heard. A sudden and faint gush of wind, like the fluttering of gigantic wings, came and turned the schooner round and round, and passed away, leaving the deadly calm as it was before. Flash—flash—the lightning came, and by its lurid light, the ocean to the southward shone in one sheet of foam.
“How is your helm?” inquired Appadocca of the steersman.
“Very slack, your excellency. She does not feel it,” the man replied.
The sounds increased; they approached nearer and nearer; they came, and like a toy in the hand of a giant, the schooner was suddenly thrown on her beam-ends. The water washed one-half of her long deck, and the first gust of the hurricane swept with a terrible noise, over the prostrate vessel, and seemed to crush her, like a mountain that had fallen from its base, and had met some paltry obstacle in its way, while it was rolling along to find its level.
“Luff,” cried the chief to the steersman.
“Luff.”