The sheets were started, the yacht was paid off before the wind, and began the last stretch of her run. Tab came on deck with the course, staggering and holding on, and shouted it into Jack's ear. Jack nodded, and gave orders for setting it, a fresh departure being taken from the light on the mole at Ceuta.
The Merle ran close in on the eastern side of Gibraltar. The great rock, sheer and silver-gray in the moonlight, rose out of the raging seas which ringed it about with a zone of roaring breakers. Grimly self-reliant, it stood grand, silent, stupendous, unassailable in the midst of the turmoil and uproar. As the yacht raced by, staggering under her reefed canvas, Taberman regarded the rock, in face of which their craft seemed a mere mote on the blast, with a feeling as near awe as it is possible for buoyant youth to feel. He did not speak until the Merle had swept past the rock-hewn fortress. Then he drew a deep breath and bent over so that Jack could hear him amid the hissing of the sirocco.
"That's immense, Jack, isn't it?" he said.
Without taking his eyes from the throat of the mainsail he was watching as a physician at a crisis watches the pulse of a patient, Jack nodded a deep assent.
At times the Merle seemed fairly to leap like a flying fish from one wave-crest to the next in her northeasterly flight.
Chapter Six DINNER ASHORE
On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July, the Merle dropped anchor behind the inner mole of Nice. In her course northward from the Straits, she had passed to the eastward of the Baleares, crossed the Gulf of Lyons, and run smoothly into harbor before the same powerful wind that had greeted her so boisterously on her entrance into the Middle Sea.