what it is, yet, once it is revealed, confidence for ever vanishes.
Had it been daylight it is doubtful if one of these survivors could have reached that projecting ledge of rock, for it was a huge shelf overhanging a death-trap of a fissure into which the boiling waves were sucked with terrific force, and from which they spurted backwards like pillars of white steam. To look down at this vent-hole was sufficient to make the heart stand still and the hair turn white with terror, for round it the waters, all a mass of angry curd, swirled and ran like a millrace, to be swallowed into its darkness, and spewed up again in that white spurt.
How Captain Anatole had reached that giddy shelf was only one of the unfathomable mysteries of that awful night. Had his guardian demon—the demon spirit of Anarchy plucked him from the rushing pool and landed him high and safely on the only possible refuge of this wall-like precipice? It appeared as if this must be the case, for surely no wave, even from the mystic south, could have reached so high up.
Captain Anatole could not tell how he got there. All he knew was that when he left the ship he was borne, with the speed of an express train, struggling on the crest of a mighty wave, and pitched like driftwood, yet with whole bones, although sadly bruised, upon that rough floor. He had the presence of mind to untwist the rope from his own body and brace it round the first object his hands could reach, a detached great boulder, before his strength left him, and that was all he could afterwards say about this hair-breadth escape from death.
The rocks beneath their feet trembled as with an earthquake with the force of those exploding chemicals,
