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Updated: June 7, 2025
She was grandly sparred, with very heavy lower-masts, long mastheads, painted white, very taunt topmasts, topgallant and royal- masts, stayed to a hair, with a slight rake aft, and accurately parallel, and enormously long yards. The French ensign floated lazily from the end of her standing gaff.
Suddenly there was a sound as if the earth were rent asunder. In one pointed mass of flame up went the tall masts, and spars, and the decks of the huge `L'Orient. They seemed, in one body of fire, to rise above our mastheads, and then down they came, spreading far and wide, hissing into the water among the boats and the hundreds of poor wretches struggling for their lives.
There was a strong breeze blowing from the north-east, with a fair amount of sea on, and the day was brilliantly fine, with a rich, clear, crystalline blue sky, dappled here and there with puffs of white trade-cloud sailing solemnly athwart our mastheads; a splendid day for sailing, and we had the whole of it before us.
Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from profounds of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease and that continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell Standing, bare-footed in the dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota farm, chilblained when of frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and awe of the splendour and terror of God when I sat on Sundays under the rant and preachment of the New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.
Still the flags of their respective countries waved at the mastheads of the frigates. The mast did not come down either when Harry thought it would, neither did the firing cease altogether.
Here also lay the Sultan's fleet, with blood-red ensigns floating from their mastheads, the ships being remarkable, if for nothing else, for their weather-beaten, sunburned appearance.
"There are at least four frigates," added Higson, "and fully half a dozen smaller craft; and see, over the point, those mastheads; there are four of them, and evidently ships of the line. That makes not much fewer than our fleet; if they've any pluck in them, they'll come out and fight us; and our admirals are the men to give them every chance of doing so."
Perhaps it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing; while the fishing-boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of the Channel, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours.
Slowly the night wore away and therewith the buffeting wind gentled somewhat; gradually in the east was a pale glimmer that, growing, showed great, black masses of torn cloud scudding fast above our reeling mastheads and all about us a troubled sea. But as the light grew, look how I might, nowhere could I descry aught of any ship upon that vast horizon of foaming waters.
Lights were hung at the mastheads fore and aft and a huge searchlight hurriedly adjusted on the forepart of the conning tower and the electrical connections made amidships. Out of the mist that overhung the sea burst forth suddenly a great glare. Through the fog loomed a white mass of flame like the blast of a thousand furnaces, with tongues of fire piercing the night gloom.
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