most every conceivable kind of craft, from a Fijian war canoe to the
latest battlecruiser, trying to buck head seas, and invariably the wave
that swept it had the decency to announce its coming by a warning knock
on the bows. This time there was nothing of the kind. The retreating sea
had lifted her stern so high that the forecastle was under water even
before the coming one had begun to topple over on to it. The consequence
was that there was no preliminary bang to herald the onrush of the
latter.

The base of the mountainous roller simply flooded up over the diving
forecastle and crashed with unbroken force against the bridge. We had
collided with the "brick wall" right enough, and for the next few
seconds at least the result was primal chaos.

I have a vivid but detached recollection of two or three things in the
instant that the blow impended. One is of the helmsman, crouching low,
with legs wide apart, locking his arms through the slender steel spokes
of the wheel the better to steady her in the coming smash. Another is of
the captain, with hunched shoulders and set jaw, throwing over the
telegraph to stop the engines. But the clearest picture of all is of the
submarine lookout on the port side--a black-eyed, black-haired boy with
a profile that might have been copied from an old Roman coin--who was
leaning out and grinning sardonically into the very teeth of the
descending hydraulic ram. It was his savagely-flung anatomy, I believe,
though I never made sure, which bumped me in the region of the solar
plexus a moment later and broke my slipping hold on the buckling
stanchion to which I was trying to cling.

There was nothing whatever suggestive of water--soft, fluent, trickling
water--in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as
solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I
have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas
is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their
proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and
partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was
not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the
crash were stupendous, yet neither of these has left so vivid a mental
impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel
stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking
sound of rending metal. I have no recollection