h
before, but we shall be worse off than ever now. And they were all good
men, too; we can ill spare them."

"Ay," agreed Enderby; "there's others that we could better have spared,
if some of 'em had to go. But as to them bein' good men--well, they was
good enough sailor-men, I won't deny, but if we'd lost 'em any other way
than bein' drownded--if they'd cut and run, for instance--I wouldn't ha'
grieved overmuch at the loss of the two Dagoes."

Thereupon we fell silent, for to out-shout the yell of the wind and the
roar of the sea was no easy matter; moreover the loss of those three men
set me thinking, and on top of that the ship needed most careful
watching, for, in light trim as she was, there were moments when the
rudder seemed to lose control of her, and then it taxed our skill and
strength to the utmost to prevent her broaching to, which would have
meant the end of her and of all hands.

I shall never forget that night, so long as I live. Never before had I
known it blow anything like so hard; the wind smote one like something
solid and with such tremendous force that to have stood up, unsupported,
against the pressure of it, would have been impossible. If it had been
blowing, say, half as hard as it actually was, there would have been a
terrific sea running, but, far from this being the case, the surface of
the ocean was as flat as a billiard-table, the slightest roughness being
instantly seized by the wind and swept away to leeward in the form of
scud-water.

Then there was the appalling unnatural darkness, through which the ship
was rushing at a speed which I am certain she had never before attained.
The only mitigating circumstance was that the wind-lashed sea emitted a
certain ghostly radiance that, despite the deluge of spindrift and scud-
water with which the air was saturated, enabled one dimly to discern
objects as far forward as the foremast. But to rush, at the speed at
which we were travelling, into the heart of that pitchy blackness was
nerve-racking work, for although the chart assured us that we had a
clear sea for some hundreds of miles ahead, there were still such
possibilities as derelicts to be reckoned with, and under such
circumstances as I have been endeavouring to describe, if an obstacle of
any sort should happen to be in our way, to avoid it would be a sheer
impossibility, while to strike it would mean for us simply--destruction.

I was anxiously considering the chance of such an