A moment ago all the energy of our desires had gone up in the ambition to avoid being cast on the beach.  Now we saw that that was not enough.  It was necessary to squeeze around the point where lay the Golden Horn, in order to avoid the fate that had overtaken her.  Handy Solomon yelled something at us.  We could not hear, but our own knowledge told us what it must be, and with one accord we turned to on the foresail.  With the peak of it hoisted we moved a trifle faster, though the schooner lay over at a perilous angle.  A moment later the fogs parted to show us the cliffs looming startlingly near.  There were the donkey engine and the works we had constructed for wrecking—­and there beside them, watching us reflectively, stood Percy Darrow.

For ten minutes we stared at him fascinated, during which time the ship laboured against the staggering winds, gained and lost in its buffeting with the great surges.  The breakers hurling themselves in wild abandon against the rocks sent their back-wash of tumbling peaks to our very bilges.  The few remains of the Golden Horn, alternately drenched and draining, seemed to picture to us our inevitable end.

I think we had all selected the same two points for our “bearings,” a rock and a drop of the cliff bolder than the ordinary.  If the rock opened from the cliff to eastward, we were lost; if it remained stationary, we were at least holding our own; if it opened out to westward, we were saved.  We watched with a strained eagerness impossible to describe.  At each momentary gain or rebuff we uttered ejaculations.  The Nigger mumbled charms.  Every once in a while one of us would snatch a glance to leeward at the cruel, white waters, the whirl of eddies where the sea was beaten, only to hurry back to the rock and the point of the cliff whence our message of safety or destruction was to be flung.  Once I looked up.  Percy Darrow was leaning gracefully against a stanchion, watching.  His soft hat was pulled over his eyes; he stroked softly his little moustache; I caught the white puff of his cigarette.  During the moment of my inattention something happened.  A wild shout burst from the men.  I whirled, and saw to my great joy a strip of sky westward between the cliff and the rock.  And at that very instant a billow larger than the ordinary rolled beneath us, and in the back suction of its passage I could dimly make out cruel, dangerous rocks lying almost under our keel.

Slowly we crept away.  Our progress seemed infinitesimal, and yet it was real.  In a while we had gained sea room; in a while more we were fairly under sailing way, and the cliffs had begun to drop from our quarter.  With one accord we looked back.  Percy Darrow waved his hand in an indescribably graceful and ironic gesture; then turned square on his heel and sauntered away to the north valley, out of the course of the lava.  That was the last I ever saw of him.

As we made our way from beneath the island, the weight of the wind seemed to lessen.  We got the foresail on her, then a standing jib; finally little by little all her ordinary working canvas.  Before we knew it, we were bowling along under a stiff breeze, and the island was dropping astern.