t a mystery of blind destruction it
was!

The clouds continued to stream out on high, out of the west continually,
racing and darkening all. A few yellow clefts remained, through which
the sun shot its rays in volleys. And the now greenish water was striped
more thickly with snowy froth.

By midday the _Marie_ was made completely snug for dirty weather: her
hatches battened down, and her sails storm-reefed; she bounded lightly
and elastic; for all the horrid confusion, she seemed to be playing like
the porpoises, also amused in storms. With her foresail taken in, she
simply scudded before the wind.

It had become quite dark overhead, where stretched the heavily crushing
vault. Studded with shapeless gloomy spots, it appeared a set dome,
unless a steadier gaze ascertained that everything was in the full rush
of motion; endless gray veils were drawn along, unceasingly followed by
others, from the profundities of the sky-line--draperies of darkness,
pulled from a never-ending roll.

The _Marie_ fled faster and faster before the wind; and time fled
also--before some invisible and mysterious power. The gale, the sea, the
_Marie_, and the clouds were all lashed into one great madness of hasty
flight towards the same point. The fastest of all was the wind; then the
huge seething billows, heavier and slower, toiling after; and, lastly,
the smack, dragged into the general whirl. The waves tracked her down
with their white crests, tumbling onward in continual motion, and
she--though always being caught up to and outrun--still managed to elude
them by means of the eddying waters she spurned in her wake, upon which
they vented their fury. In this similitude of flight the sensation
particularly experienced was of buoyancy, the delight of being carried
along without effort or trouble, in a springy sort of way. The _Marie_
mounted over the waves without any shaking, as if the wind had lifted
her clean up; and her subsequent descent was a slide. She almost slid
backward, though, at times, the mountains lowering before her as if
continuing to run, and then she suddenly found herself dropped into
one of the measureless hollows that evaded her also; without injury she
sounded its horrible depths, amid a loud splashing of water, which did
not even sprinkle her decks, but was blown on and on like everything
else, evaporating in finer and finer spray until it was thinned away to
nothing. In the trough it was darker, and when each wave ha