"Mind your helm," cautioned Farrar. "We'll get it hard in a moment. We don't want to be taken aback."
"There's no way on, sir," reported the quartermaster, who was assisting the helmsman at the recalcitrant tiller. "She won't answer to it."
Presently the ominous silence was torn by a shrill whistling sound—the forerunner of the approaching squall.
"Stand by fore and main sheets!" shouted the sub, as, with a sledge-hammer blow, the first of the storm burst upon the little craft.
In spite of her draught the "Georgeos Nikolaos" lay right over on her beam ends, the foam flying completely over her weather bulwarks, while the surging water was knee-deep in her lee scuppers. Spars groaned and creaked, ropes rattled against the masts like a round of machine-gun fire; blocks crashed against metal and timber work to the imminent danger of strops and sheaves, while on and below deck everything not securely lashed down broke adrift and added to the pandemonium.
For a few long-drawn seconds things looked black metaphorically and literally. It was a question whether the felucca would either capsize or be dismasted before she gathered way and answered to the helm; but nobly the hardly pressed craft responded to the challenge of the elements, and in a swelter of foam she threshed on her way through the tempestuous seas. So heavy were the rain squalls that at times it was impossible for the helmsman to discern the plunging bows, while the deck was hidden by the falling and rebounding hailstones.
"Hanged if I like that chunk of timber swaying aloft, sir!" bellowed the warrant officer, pointing to the ponderous main lateen yard. "She'll carry away her preventer back stays in a brace of shakes."
"We'll lower away the mainsail," decided Farrar. "She'll run comfortably then."
It was easier said than done to send down that long yard and secure it fore and aft. It took the united efforts of twenty men to master the stiff canvas that even when the yard was on deck was flogging and bellying out with the utmost fury, as if loath to submit to the indignity of being pinioned by the gaskets. At last the task was accomplished and the felucca, driving right before the gale, certainly made better weather of it.
For the best part of six hours the little craft ran. Both the sub and Mr. Gripper estimated her speed at eleven knots. At that rate she would soon be on a lee shore off the island of Crete, where harbours on the southern side are few and far between. The incessant rain and the blackness of the sky prevented any possibility of taking observations, and navigation became a matter of simple dead reckoning.