Chinamen in the fore 'tween deck have fetched away, sir."

Jukes to leeward could hear these two shouting within six inches of
his face, as you may hear on a still night half a mile away two men
conversing across a field. He heard Captain MacWhirr's exasperated
"What? What?" and the strained pitch of the other's hoarseness. "In a
lump . . . seen them myself. . . . Awful sight, sir . . . thought . . .
tell you."

Jukes remained indifferent, as if rendered irresponsible by the force
of the hurricane, which made the very thought of action utterly vain.
Besides, being very young, he had found the occupation of keeping his
heart completely steeled against the worst so engrossing that he had
come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity
whatever. He was not scared; he knew this because, firmly believing he
would never see another sunrise, he remained calm in that belief.

These are the moments of do-nothing heroics to which even good men
surrender at times. Many officers of ships can no doubt recall a case
in their experience when just such a trance of confounded stoicism would
come all at once over a whole ship's company. Jukes, however, had
no wide experience of men or storms. He conceived himself to be
calm--inexorably calm; but as a matter of fact he was daunted; not
abjectly, but only so far as a decent man may, without becoming
loathsome to himself.

It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long
stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating
catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to
existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue
that penetrates deep into a man's breast to cast down and sadden his
heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth--even
before life itself--aspires to peace.

Jukes was benumbed much more than he supposed. He held on--very wet,
very cold, stiff in every limb; and in a momentary hallucination of
swift visions (it is said that a drowning man thus reviews all his life)
he beheld all sorts of memories altogether unconnected with his present
situation. He remembered his father, for instance: a worthy business
man, who at an unfortunate crisis in his affairs went quietly to bed
and died forthwith in a state of resignation. Jukes did not recall these
circumstances, of course, but remaining otherwise unconcerned he seemed
to see distinctly the poor man's fac