Now dare and do, for ye have staked your all!”
“Now dare and do, for ye have staked your all!”
Navarch shouted it to navarch. The cry went up and [pg 318]down the line of the Hellenes, “loud as when billows lash the beetling crags.” The trailing oars beat again into the water, and even as the ships once more gained way, Themistocles nodded to Ameinias, and he to the keleustes. The master oarsman leaped from his seat and crashed his gavel down upon the sounding-board.
“Aru! Aru! Aru! Put it on, my men!”
The Nausicaä answered with a leap. Men wrought at the oar butts, tugging like mad, their backs toward the foe, conscious only that duty bade them send the trireme across the waves as a stone whirls from the sling. Thus the men, but Themistocles, on the poop, standing at the captain’s and governor’s side, never took his gaze from the great Barbarian that leaped defiantly to meet them.
“Can we risk the trick?” his swift question to Ameinias.
The captain nodded. “With this crew—yes.”
Two stadia, one stadium, half a stadium, a ship’s length, the triremes were charging prow to prow, rushing on a common death, when Ameinias clapped a whistle to his lips and blew shrilly. As one man every rower on the port-side leaped to his feet and dragged his oar inward through its row-hole. The deed was barely done ere the Sidonian was on them. They heard the roaring water round her prow, the cracking of the whips as the petty officers ran up and down the gangways urging on the panting cattle at the oars. Then almost at the shock the governor touched his steering oar. The Nausicaä swerved. The prow of the Sidonian rushed past them. A shower of darts pattered down on the deck of the Hellene, but a twinkling later from the Barbarians arose a frightful cry. Right across her triple oar bank, still in full speed, ploughed the Athenian. The Sidonian’s oars were snapping like faggots. The luckless rowers were flung from their benches in heaps. In less time than the telling every oar on the Barbarian’s port-side [pg 319]had been put out of play. The diekplous, favourite trick of the Grecian seamen, had never been done more fairly.
Now was Themistocles’s chance. He used it. There was no need for him to give orders to the oar master. Automatically every rower on the port-tiers of the Nausicaä had run out his blade again. The governor sent the head of the trireme around with a grim smile locked about his grizzled lips. It was no woman’s task which lay before them. Exposing her whole broadside lay the long Sidonian; she was helpless, striving vainly to crawl away with her remaining oar banks. Her people were running to and fro, howling to Baal, Astarte, Moloch, and all their other foul gods, and stretching their hands for help to consorts too far away.
“Aru! Aru! Aru!” was the shout of the oar master; again the Nausicaä answered with her leap. Straight across the narrow water she shot, the firm hand of the governor never veering now. The stroke grew faster, faster. Then with one instinct men dropped the oars, to trail in the rushing water, and seized stanchions, beams, anything to brace themselves for the shock. The crash which followed was heard on the mainland and on Salamis. The side of the Phœnician was beaten in like an egg-shell. From the Nausicaä’s poop they saw her open hull reel over, saw the hundreds of upturned, frantic faces, heard the howls of agony, saw the waves leap into the gaping void.—