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There was a reef of rocks far out, lying all apart; when the sea raged up over it the water towered like a crazy screw; nay, like a sea-god rising wet in the air, and snorting, till hair and beard stood out like a wheel about his head. Then he plunged down into the breakers once more. And in the midst of the storm, a little coal-black steamer fighting its way in...
Maria clapped her hands and declared the best of all were the sea-horses "Cavalli marini," she called them. Then, what a glorious afternoon they had on the smooth beach, hunting for shells and digging in the sand. How Andrea laughed when his father took him away out and let the breakers roll over him.
With the assistance of the boat and good management, they at length passed clear over the bar on the edge of the breakers, in a depth of quarter less three fathoms, and made sail to the eastward.
And he plunged into the foaming billows. His progress was anxiously watched as he rose now on the top of a roaring sea, now concealed as he sank into the hollow to appear again on the side of another, all the time buffeting the foaming breakers, now avoiding a mass of timber, now grasping a spar, and making it support him as he forced his way onward, until he was lost to sight in the gloom.
Whilst busily engaged upon one of them, in trying to get some crabs out from its clefts, I did not notice that the surf sometimes washed over where I stood, until whilst stooping, and in the act of fishing out a crab, a roller came further than usual and dashing over me, threw me down and took both me and my crabs to some distance, nearly carrying us down the steep into the sea, from which nothing could have rescued me, as I should soon have been dashed to pieces by the breakers against the rocks.
That scared me at first; I thought night had come, and remembered the light. But then I saw the gloom was of a storm. The floor was shining wet, and the water in my face was spray, flung up through the open door. When I ran to close it, it almost made me dizzy to see the gray-and-white breakers marching past.
From this harbor he ran on south for a few miles past Cape Disappointment, and then sailed through an opening in the breakers into a bay which he supposed formed the mouth of the river of which he was in search. He finally anchored, as he says, "in a large river of fresh water."
Off the cape were strange, oily cross rips and currents on the surface of the sea; the flying-fish rose in flocks before our bows; high mountains of peaks and flat table tops thrust their summits into clouds; and along the coast the breakers spouted like whales. For the first time, too, we began to experience what our preconceptions had imagined as tropical heat.
He admitted that he had seen nothing that he could very decidedly say was breakers, but that, once or twice, when it lighted up a little, there had been a gleaming along the western horizon which a good deal puzzled him. It might be white water, or it might be only the last rays of the setting sun tipping the combs of the regular seas.
At length we brought the last of the visible breakers fair on our quarter, and I was in the act of putting the helm over, singing out at the same time to haul down the staysail and foresail, when the mate, who was on the forecastle ready to attend to the letting go of the anchors, shouted that he thought he could make out something like a large rock or small islet a short distance ahead.
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