'Ransack his cabin!' said I loudly.
The fellow shook his head, but there was enjoyment in his grin, with an expression of elation in his eyes that borrowed a quality of fierceness from the singularly keen gleam which irradiated their dusky depths. I was about to speak, when Helga raised her hand.
'Hark!' she cried.
I bent my ear, and caught a sound resembling the low moan of surf heard at a distance.
'More than a capful of wind goes to the making of that noise,' said I.
A bright flash of lightning dazzled upon the skylight and eclipsed the cabin-lamp with its blinding bluish glare. A small shock of thunder followed. I heard the Captain cry out an order; the next minute the skylight was hastily closed and a tarpaulin thrown over it.
'Bring me my oilskins, Punmeamootty!' shouted the Captain down the companionway. The man ran on deck with the things.
'Can that be rain?' cried Helga.
Rain it was indeed! a very avalanche of wet, charged with immense hailstones. The roar of the smoking discharge upon the planks was absolutely deafening. It lasted about a couple of minutes, then ceased with startling suddenness, and you heard nothing but the surf-like moaning that had now gathered a deeper and a more thrilling note, mingled with the wild sobbing in the scuppers, and a melancholy hissing of wet as the water on the quarter-deck splashed from side to side to the light rolling of the barque. Yet fully another five minutes passed in quiet, while the growling of the thunder of the still distant storm-swept sea waxed fiercer and fiercer. It was as though one stood at the mouth of a tunnel and listened to the growing rattling and rumbling of a long train of goods waggons approaching in tow of a panting locomotive.
Then in a breath the wind smote the barque, and down she leaned to it. So amazingly violent was the angle, I do most truthfully believe that for the space of some twenty or thirty seconds the barque lay completely on her beam ends, as much so as if she were bilged high and dry upon a shoal, and there was a dreadful noise of water pouring in upon her deck from over the submerged lee main-deck rail.