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And then storms rolled in and rose before my eyes, distinct for a moment, and breaking, such as I'd seen them from the Shoals in broad daylight, when tempestuous columns scooped themselves up from the green gulfs and shattered in loam on the shuddering rock, ah! but that was day, and this was midnight and murk! storms as I'd heard tell of them off Cape Race, when great steamers went down with but one cry, and the waters crowded them out of sight, storms where, out of the wilderness of waves that far and wide wasted white around, a single one came ploughing on straight to the mark, gathering its grinding masses mast-high, poising, plunging, and swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction, storms where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and the sea lashes and beats them with great strokes and sucks them down to death: and right in the midst of it all there burst a gun, one, another, and no more.
They did not, and I was just turning away disconsolate when my eye caught, ascending from behind the next bluff down the beach, a thin strand of smoke rising into the morning air. It was nothing so much in itself a thin spiral creeping upwards mast-high, then flattening out into a mushroom head but it meant everything to me.
How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!
Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems and branches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were mast-high, and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the mountain fastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of Monte Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys lead downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast.
And then there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold; And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald. So says that wonder-ballad of the sea.
"Keep your pennant mast-high, Emeline," he said cheerfully. "We ain't out at sea, that's sure and sartin. And, until we get in the breakers, we're safe enough. The old gal leaks some; she ain't as dry as a Good-Templar prayer meetin', but she's afloat. And when I'm afloat I ain't afraid, and you needn't be." Some time after that he asked a question in his turn.
Two or three sea-gulls were circling drearily between them and the coast, where they could now see a long line of yellow foaming breakers like a huge wall, rising and falling on the sandbanks, with here and there a mast-high jet of spray from some reef outside. Although the wind was on shore they could hear the dull thunder of the breakers there, and a kind of dim rumbling in the air.
The sun was shining upon it and upon the tumbling sea; and although the waves were still raging mast-high and the wind still blowing a hard gale, the miserable crew were able to hope that, having lived through the night, they could live through the day also.
It sank so deep that it left beds of shells belonging to the Arctic regions nearly two thousand feet high upon the mountain side. And so "It grew wondrous cold, And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald." But there were no masts then to measure the icebergs by, nor any ship nor human being there.
Your old chum, Catesby-Stuart, thought he was mast-high so fur's sailing was concerned, anybody could see that, but he had something to larn. He wasn't beginning to get out all there was in that ice-boat. And just then along comes another feller in the same kind of hooker and gives us a hail. There was two other chaps on the boat with him.
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