They held hard. An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of
the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and

light like a child's cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense,
while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past

her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth.
It suffocated them, and with eyes shut they tightened their

grasp. What from the magnitude of the shock might have been a
column of water runningupright in the dark, butted against the

ship, broke short, and fell on her bridge, crushingly, from on
high, with a dead burying weight.

A flying fragment of that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them
in one swirl from their feet over their heads, filling violently

their ears, mouths and nostrils with salt water. It knocked out
their legs, wrenched in haste at their arms, seethed away swiftly

under their chins; and opening their eyes, they saw the piled-up
masses of foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like the

fragments of a ship. She had given way as if driven straight in.
Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the tremendous blow;

and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as
if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.

The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her
back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was

handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a
living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly,

struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. Captain MacWhirr
and Jukes kept hold of each other, deafened by the noise, gagged

by the wind; and the great physicaltumultbeating about their
bodies, brought, like an unbridled display of passion, a profound

trouble to their souls. One of those wild and appalling shrieks
that are heard at times passing mysteriouslyoverhead in the

steady roar of a hurricane, swooped, as if borne on wings, upon
the ship, and Jukes tried to outscream it.

"Will she live through this?"
The cry was wrenched out of his breast. It was as unintentional

as the birth of a thought in the head, and he heard nothing of it
himself. It all became extinct at once -- thought, intention,

effort -- and of his cry the inaudible vibration added to the
tempest waves of the air.

He expected nothing from it. Nothing at all. For indeed what
answer could be made? But after a while he heard with amazement

the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound,
unconquered in the giant tumult.

"She may!"
It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize than a whisper. And

presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast
crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean.

"Let's hope so!" it cried -- small, lonely and unmoved, a
stranger to the visions of hope or fear; and it flickered into

disconnected words: "Ship. . . . . This. . . . Never -- Anyhow .
. . for the best." Jukes gave it up.

Then, as if it had come suddenly upon the one thing fit to
withstand the power of a storm, it seemed to gain force and

firmness for the last broken shouts:
"Keep on hammering . . . builders . . . good men. . . . . And

chance it . . . engines. . . . Rout . . . good man."
Captain MacWhirr removed his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and

thereby ceased to exist for his mate, so dark it was; Jukes,
after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go

limp all over. The gnawing of profounddiscomfort existed side
by side with an incredibledisposition to somnolence, as though

he had been buffeted and worried into drowsiness. The wind would
get hold of his head and try to shake it off his shoulders; his

clothes, full of water, were as heavy as lead, cold and dripping
like an armour of melting ice: he shivered -- it lasted a long

time; and with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting
himself sink slowly into the depths of bodilymisery. His mind

became concentrated upon himself in an aimless, idle way, and
when something pushed lightly at the back of his knees he nearly,

as the saying is, jumped out of his skin.
In the start forward he bumped the back of Captain MacWhirr, who

didn't move; and then a hand gripped his thigh. A lull had come,
a menacing lull of the wind, the holding of a stormy breath --

and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes
recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to

belong to some new species of man.
The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours

against the wind, and had found the chief mate's legs with the
top of his head. Immediately he crouched and began to explore

Jukes' person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became
an inferior.

He was an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty,
coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly

ape. His strength was immense; and in his great lumpy paws,
bulging like brown boxinggloves on the end of furry forearms, the

heaviest objects were handled like playthings. Apart from the
grizzled pelt on his chest, the menacing demeanour and the hoarse

voice, he had none of the classical attributes of his rating.
His good nature almost amounted to imbecility: the men did what

they liked with him, and he had not an ounce of initiative in his
character, which was easy-going and talkative. For these reasons

Jukes disliked him; but Captain MacWhirr, to Jukes' scornful
disgust, seemed to regard him as a first-rate petty officer.

He pulled himself up by Jukes' coat, taking that liberty with the
greatest moderation, and only so far as it was forced upon him by

the hurricane.
"What is it, boss'n, what is it?" yelled Jukes, impatiently.

What could that fraud of a boss'n want on the bridge? The
typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves. The husky bellowings of the

other, though unintelligible, seemed to suggest a state of lively
satisfaction.

There could be no mistake. The old fool was pleased with
something.

The boatswain's other hand had found some other body, for in a
changed tone he began to inquire: "Is it you, sir? Is it you,

sir?" The wind strangled his howls.
"Yes!" cried Captain MacWhirr.

IV
ALL that the boatswain, out of a superabundance of yells, could

make clear to Captain MacWhirr was the bizarre intelligence that
"All them 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 bodilyfatigue in the

mere holding on to existence within the excessivetumult; a