ng
the coast before we are driven ashore, and may perceive some spot
towards which we may direct her with a chance of making land ere she
goes to pieces."

The sail was still further lessened and the ship's head brought round
parallel with the coast.

The Dragon laboured tremendously as the sea struck her full on the
beam, and every wave flooded her low waist. Each sea which struck her
lifted her bodily to leeward, and for every foot she sailed forward she
was driven one towards the coast. This was now but three miles distant,
and another hour would ensure her destruction; for none there hoped
that the anchors, even should they find bottom, could hold her for an
instant in the teeth of the gale. Every eye was directed towards the
shore, but no break could be seen in the wall of rock which rose almost
perpendicularly from the water.

"I fear it is hopeless," Edmund said to Egbert; "the strongest swimmer
would be dashed to pieces in an instant against those rocks."

"He would indeed," Egbert replied. "I wish now that we had boldly
engaged the four Danish ships. Far better would it have been for us to
have died fighting for England on her decks than to have perished here."

The time passed slowly. Every minute the Dragon was swept nearer and
nearer towards the rocks.

"She will just make that headland," the master sailor said, "and that
is all. Once round it we had best turn her head to the rocks. If the
cliffs rise as here sheer from the water, the moment she strikes will
be the last for all of us; but if the rocks are, as in some places,
piled high at the foot of the cliffs, a few may possibly manage to leap
from her forecastle as she strikes and to clamber up."

Scarce a word was spoken on board the Dragon as she came abreast of the
headland. It was but a few hundred yards away. The roar of the seas as
they struck its base sounded high above the din of the storm. Great
sheets of foam were thrown up to a vast height, and the turmoil of the
water from the reflux of the waves was so great that the Dragon was
tossed upon it like a cock-boat, and each man had to grasp at shroud or
bulwark to retain his footing.

Suddenly a cheer burst from end to end of the ship. Beyond the headland
a great gap was visible a quarter of a mile wide, as if the cliffs had
been rent in sunder by some tremendous convulsion, and a fiord was seen
stretching away in the bosom of the hills as far as the eye could
reach. The Dragon's head wa