istence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks
of dumbness.

"I remember wondering," Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly,
"what would become of the ship's cat."

This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments.
Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times.
And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar
chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and
ended nowhere.

But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly
an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and
the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the
others had begun to bore and irritate.

There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and
readjusting silence.

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip,
had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone
showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,
were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity
that was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another
on another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested,
involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they
crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.
Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly
palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged
reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.
Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live
creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated
a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant,
then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying,
reared and sprang at the rock again.

Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage. Here and
there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into crazy
attitudes. Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the water-line.
Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a ceaseless,
grotesque frolic with the foamy waters. Out of a mass of wood caught
between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a woman's head, livid,
rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes straight at their
group. Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in s