e immense flurry of
the elements. When he ventured to blink hastily, he derived some moral
support from the green gleam of the starboard light shining feebly upon
the flight of rain and sprays. He was actually looking at it when its
ray fell upon the uprearing sea which put it out. He saw the head of the
wave topple over, adding the mite of its crash to the tremendous uproar
raging around him, and almost at the same instant the stanchion was
wrenched away from his embracing arms. After a crushing thump on his
back he found himself suddenly afloat and borne upwards. His first
irresistible notion was that the whole China Sea had climbed on the
bridge. Then, more sanely, he concluded himself gone overboard. All the
time he was being tossed, flung, and rolled in great volumes of water,
he kept on repeating mentally, with the utmost precipitation, the words:
"My God! My God! My God! My God!"

All at once, in a revolt of misery and despair, he formed the crazy
resolution to get out of that. And he began to thresh about with his
arms and legs. But as soon as he commenced his wretched struggles he
discovered that he had become somehow mixed up with a face, an oilskin
coat, somebody's boots. He clawed ferociously all these things in
turn, lost them, found them again, lost them once more, and finally was
himself caught in the firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He returned
the embrace closely round a thick solid body. He had found his captain.

They tumbled over and over, tightening their hug. Suddenly the water
let them down with a brutal bang; and, stranded against the side of the
wheelhouse, out of breath and bruised, they were left to stagger up in
the wind and hold on where they could.

Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as though he had escaped some
unparalleled outrage directed at his feelings. It weakened his faith in
himself. He started shouting aimlessly to the man he could feel near him
in that fiendish blackness, "Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?" till his
temples seemed ready to burst. And he heard in answer a voice, as if
crying far away, as if screaming to him fretfully from a very great
distance, the one word "Yes!" Other seas swept again over the bridge.
He received them defencelessly right over his bare head, with both his
hands engaged in holding.

The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling
helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed
to find a wall to