Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.
‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’
Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the Vanderfield’s iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming Cornucopia never, never come?
The young Operators talk, using informal words:
‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in the wireless-room of the Cornucopia. ‘The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a half knots, against this. Do you realise it—against this! Look along to the South. Now!’
There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous baton against the black canopy of the monstrous storm-clouds, beating to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she strides through the miles.
And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring on to her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.