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By paying out the chains, the ship had fallen farther astern, until she took the ground abaft on the edge of the sand-bank so often mentioned; and, once fast at that end, her bows had fallen off, pressed by the wind, as long as the depth of the water would allow.
Who could suppose that upon that slender sand-bank, one hundred and twenty miles in length, and varying in breadth from four miles to forty, one man, backed by the population of a handful of cities, could do battle nine years long with the master of two worlds, the "Dominator Of Asia, Africa, and America" the despot of the fairest realms of Europe and conquer him at last.
The beauty of life has power greater than the beauty of the sea. One night after I had made my bed on a grassy sand-bank above the sea and was waiting, in the thrilling and breathless twilight, to fall asleep, I suddenly heard a sound as of a child weeping somewhere. My heart bounded in horror.
She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.
A fierce gale was raging, threatening every instant to carry away their tent; while the sea, which had hitherto only lapped the edge of the sand-bank, now came foaming up against it in heavy billows. "The boat, the boat!" cried Owen. "Our first care must be to secure her, if she is not knocked to pieces already. She is of more importance than the tent or anything else."
A ship had gone to the bottom a British man-of-war, a corvette on her way to her cruising ground, on the Guinea coast. Beguiled by the dangerous current that sets towards the seaboard of the Saara, in a dark stormy night she had struck upon a sand-bank; got bilged; and sank almost instantly among the breakers.
His attention was drawn to this object, from the circumstance of the water being in a state of commotion around it, while the sea elsewhere was perfectly placid. On further examination, he discovered that some large fish was chasing a shoal of whiting, and in his eagerness to capture his prey, he more than once ran on the sand-bank.
All he could discover was that the firmament was mantled with darkness, horrible from its intensity, and that the sea was in one extended foam boiling everywhere, and white as milk but still smooth, as if the power of the wind had compelled it to be so; but the water had encroached, and one half the sand-bank was covered with it, while over the other the foam whirled, each portion chasing the other with wild rapidity.
Many vessels used to be lost here, and a few are wrecked still; and the skeletons and corpses of those who have perished lie all over the sand-bank. Sometimes, at midnight, I have seen crowds of human figures moving backwards and forwards upon the surface of the ocean, almost as far as the eye could reach. I neither knew who they were, nor what they did there.
The mate directed the rest of the party to collect all the spars, planks, and cordage they could find. "We might live on here for months, lads," said Mr Scoones, "but should another gale spring up somewhat rougher than the last, we may all be swept away; so depend upon it, the sooner we get off this sand-bank the better.
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