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I said, trying to get a good look landward as the vessel rolled over that way. "No," said the man. "We could see the light just before day-break, but the weather's gettin' thick now, and we're keepin' out." It was pretty thick to the west, that was true. All that I could see in the distance was a very mixed-up picture of wave-tops and mist.
In the end had to run for it sooner than we meant, as we were sagging to leeward in spite of all, and the light was failing. Bore up at 5.15, and raced up the channel with the booms on our left scarcely visible in the surf and rising water. Davies stood forward, signalling port, starboard, or steady with his arms, while I wrestled with the helm, flung from side to side and flogged by wave-tops.
The dirigible had by this time settled so badly that she was barely twenty feet above the wave-tops. Some sacks of ballast still remained, kept by Frank for an emergency. He now was compelled reluctantly to give the order to cut these away and one by one they dropped overboard; but as they did so, the ship rose and an hour later they landed on a smooth beach.
"She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This lop is what fetches it up." The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good omen.
The sun, shining from a sky of burnished gold, throws into silhouette the twin lighthouses at the entrance to Whitby Harbour, and turns the foaming wave-tops into a dazzling white, accentuated by the long shadows of early day.
A day or two later on, the weather changed, the wind blew up in angry soughs from the south-west, and, meeting the strong flow of the spring tide, curled the green wave-tops into those small feathers of foam, always the fore-runners of rough weather.
The land was gone, all but a little streak, like a snake, away off on the edge of the water, and down under us was just ocean, ocean, ocean millions of miles of it, heaving and pitching and squirming, and white sprays blowing from the wave-tops, and only a few ships in sight, wallowing around and laying over, first on one side and then on t'other, and sticking their bows under and then their sterns; and before long there warn't no ships at all, and we had the sky and the whole ocean all to ourselves, and the roomiest place I ever see and the lonesomest.
The spitting bang followed again, and something skipped along the wave-tops beside us, raising little pillars of spray that drifted away on the wind. The schooner came back on her course, heading straight for us; a shout like groaned applause went up from on board us. Lumsden hid his face in his hands. I could hear little Mercer shrieking out orders forwards. We were shortening sail.
Our faces were running with the salt spray that swished over the bows or flew over the quarters, to stream down into the bilge at our feet, foul with fragments of squid and caplin long dead. We were also beginning to listen eagerly for other sounds than the wind hissing in the cordage, the breaking of wave-tops and the hard thumping of the blunt bows upon the seas.
He mounts; the animal speeds away to the cliff, but does not pause at the brink this time: with a sickening jump and fall he goes into the sea. Spurning the wave-tops in his flight he makes a circuit of the burning ship, and in the hellish light, that fills the air and penetrates to the ocean bottom, the pirate sees again his victims looking up with smiles and arms spread to embrace him.
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