'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting¹ deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern². They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar³ over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge⁴ in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed⁵ "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile⁶, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust⁷; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry⁸ that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched⁹ down in the bows and stole a furtive¹⁰ glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred¹¹ like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see it still there," he said. That's what he said. What terrified him was the thought that the drowning was not over yet. No doubt he wanted to be done with that abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody in the boat made a sound. In the dark she seemed to fly, but of course she could not have had much way. Then the shower swept ahead, and the great, distracting,

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