north wind bites, the billows devour, the waves
are like hungry jaws. The ocean strikes like a lion with its heavy paw,
seizing and dismembering at the same moment.

The ruin conspicuous in the Durande presented the peculiarity of being
detailed and minute. It was a sort of horrible stripping and plucking.
Much of it seemed done with design. The beholder was tempted to exclaim,
"What wanton mischief!" The ripping of the planking was edged here and
there artistically. This peculiarity is common with the ravages of the
cyclone. To chip and tear away is the caprice of the great devastator.
Its ways are like those of the professional torturer. The disasters
which it causes wear a look of ingenious punishments. One might fancy it
actuated by the worst passions of man. It refines in cruelty like a
savage. While it is exterminating it dissects bone by bone. It torments
its victim, avenges itself, and takes delight in its work. It even
appears to descend to petty acts of malice.

Cyclones are rare in our latitudes, and are, for that reason, the more
dangerous, being generally unexpected. A rock in the path of a heavy
wind may become the pivot of a storm. It is probable that the squall had
thus rotated upon the point of the Douvres, and had turned suddenly into
a waterspout on meeting the shock of the rocks, a fact which explained
the casting of the vessel so high among them. When the cyclone blows, a
vessel is of no more weight in the wind than a stone in a sling.

The damage received by the Durande was like the wound of a man cut in
twain. It was a divided trunk from which issued a mass of _debris_ like
the entrails of a body. Various kinds of cordage hung floating and
trembling, chains swung chattering; the fibres and nerves of the vessel
were there naked and exposed. What was not smashed was disjointed.

Fragments of the sheeting resembled currycombs bristling with nails;
everything bore the appearance of ruin; a handspike had become nothing
but a piece of iron; a sounding-lead, nothing but a lump of metal; a
dead-eye had become a mere piece of wood; a halliard, an end of rope; a
strand of cord, a tangled skein; a bolt-rope, a thread in the hem of a
sail. All around was the lamentable work of demolition. Nothing remained
that was not unhooked, unnailed, cracked, wasted, warped, pierced with
holes, destroyed: nothing hung together in the dreadful mass, but all
was torn, dislocated, broken. There was that air of drift which