o the deep. They bound
the woman--she was hardly conscious now--into the little shelter formed by
the junction of the broken sail-yard and the mast. The two men sat beside
her, shielding her with their bodies from the beat of the spray. Speech
was all but impossible. They were fain to close their eyes and pray to be
delivered from the unceasing screaming of the wind, the howling of the
waters. And so for hours....

Glaucon never knew how long they thus drifted. The _Solon_ had been
smitten very early in the morning. She had foundered perhaps at noon. It
may have been shortly before sunset--though Helios never pierced the clouds
that storm-racked day--when Glaucon knew that the Barbarian was speaking to
him.

"Look!" The wind had lulled a little; the man could make himself heard.
"What is it?"

Through the masses of gray spray and driving mist Glaucon gazed when the
next long wave tossed them. A glimpse,--but the joys of Olympus seemed
given with that sight; wind-swept, wave-beaten, rock-bound, that half-seen
ridge of brown was land,--and land meant life, the life he had longed to
fling away in the morning, the life he longed to keep that night. He
shouted the discovery to his companion, who bowed his head, manifestly in
prayer.

The wind bore them rapidly. Glaucon, who knew the isles of the AEgean as
became a Hellene, was certain they drove on Astypalaea, an isle subject to
Persia, though one of the outermost Cyclades. The woman was in no state to
realize their crisis. Only a hand laid on her bosom told that her heart
still fluttered. She could not endure the surge and the suffocating spray
much longer. The two men sat in silence, but their eyes went out hungrily
toward the stretch of brown as it lifted above the wave crests. The last
moments of the desperate voyage crept by like the pangs of Tantalus.
Slowly they saw unfolding the fog-clothed mountains, a forest, scattered
bits of white they knew were stuccoed houses; but while their eyes brought
joy, their ears brought sadness. The booming of the surf upon an outlying
ledge grew ever clearer. Almost ere they knew it the drifting mast was
stayed with a shock. They saw two rocks swathed in dripping weed that
crusted with knife-like barnacles, thrust their black heads out of the
boiling water. And beyond--fifty paces away--the breakers raced up the sandy
shore where waited refuge.

The spar wedged fast in the rocks. The waves beat over it pitilessly. He
who stayed