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Opposite, across the King's Road, the mastheads of the fishing boats on the beach just rise above the rails of the cliff, tipped with fluttering pennants, or fish-shaped vanes changing to the wind.
There were neither moon nor stars to be seen, and the dark clouds settled down, until they appeared to rest upon our mastheads, compressing, as it were, the hot steamy air upon us until it became too dense for breathing.
Not till she was well outside them did they begin to suspect the character of the stranger which had paid them a visit that morning, when their signal-flags were seen run up to the mastheads, answered by two or three of the outermost frigates. Just then a schooner was seen entering under Russian colours.
Three of the Terrible's officers accompanied their Captain; the rest were distributed among the vacancies in the fleet. There floated the old Terrible, with her well-riddled and torn sails furled, but her pendant, and ensign, and Union-Jack still flying at her peak and mastheads. She was deserted.
All this time the little Wave was carrying to it gallantly, her jib boom bending like whalebone, and her long slender topmasts whipping about like a couple of fishing rods, as she thrashed at it, sending the spray flashing over her mastheads at every pitch; but notwithstanding her weatherly qualities, the heavy cross sea, as she drove into it, headed her off bodily, and she could not prevent the Gleam from creeping up on her weather quarter, where she peppered away from her long 24 pounder, throwing the shot over and over us.
There, sure enough, was a dark smudge of smoke on the horizon. "Get the glass," said Sackett. He took it and gazed hard at the dark streak. "I can just make out her mastheads. She seems to be coming along this way," he said, after a moment. All hands gathered upon the poop and watched the smoke.
The Pyrenees sailed the ten miles; she sailed ten miles more; and the lookouts at the three mastheads saw naught but the naked, sun-washed sea. "But the land is there, I tell you," Captain Davenport shouted to them from the poop. McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman, fetched his sextant, and took a chronometer sight.
They were like destroyers, but without mastheads, without smokestacks, skimming along almost on a level with the water, painted in a gray that made them seem a short distance away of the same color as the sea. They came around on both sides of the sailboat as though they were going to crush it with the meeting of their hulls.
The men at the wheel, the lookouts kept constantly at the mastheads, the marines doing sentry duty, with the midshipmen of the watch and the officer of the deck busily pacing to and fro, were the only people, out of the six hundred and odd men who made up the ship's complement, who presented any appearance of activity whatever.
The fire increased her guns went off as they became heated she gave a sudden heel and while five hundred human beings, pent up in her noisome hold, split the heavens with their piercing death yells, down she went with a heavy lurch, head foremost, right in the wake of the setting sun, whose level rays made the thick dun wreaths that burst from her as she disappeared, glow with the hue of the amethyst; and while the whirling clouds, gilded by his dying radiance, curled up into the blue sky, in rolling masses, growing thinner and thinner, until they vanished away, even like the wreck whereout they arose, and the circling eddies, created by her sinking, no longer sparkled and flashed in the red light and the stilled waters where she had gone down, as if oil had been cast on them, were spread out like polished silver, shining like a mirror, while all around was dark blue ripple, a puff of fat black smoke, denser than any we had yet seen, suddenly emerged with a loud gurgling noise, from out the deep bosom of the calmed sea, and rose like a balloon, rolling slowly upwards, until it reached a little way above our mastheads, where it melted and spread out into a dark pall, that overhung the scene of death, as if the incense of such a horrible and polluted sacrifice could not ascend into the pure heaven, but had been again crushed back upon our devoted heads, as a palpable manifestation of the wrath of Him who hath said "Thou shalt not kill."
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