Angel Island

Without reason, they fell again into silence.

They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the sea

spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little

terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first

inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives,

exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started

with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences

beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as

though mentally they slavered. But every phrase, however confused and

inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful

buffeting and their terrific final struggle. And every clause, whether

sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their

pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be. All

this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the

incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from

end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to

beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that

lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous,

semi-tropical coast.

Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.

With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated

and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually

grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks

of dumbness.

"I remember wondering," Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly,

"what would become of the ship's cat."

This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments.

Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times.

And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar

chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and

ended nowhere.

But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly

an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and

the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the

others had begun to bore and irritate.

There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and

readjusting silence.

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had

died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone

showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,

were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that

was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another on

another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested,

involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they

crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.

Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly

palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged

reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.

Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live

creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated

a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant,

then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying,

reared and sprang at the rock again.