We were lying head to sea, and never a bit of canvas left except one storm-staysail.  There were tattered ribands fluttering on the yards to show where the sails had been blown away, and every now and then the staysail would flap like a gun going off, to show it wanted to follow them.  But for all we lay head to sea, we were moving backwards, and each great wave as it passed carried us on stern first with a leap and swirling lift.  ’Twas over the stern that Elzevir pointed, in the course that we were going, and there was such a mist, what with the wind and rain and spindrift, that one could see but a little way.  And yet I saw too far, for in the mist to which we were making a sternboard, I saw a white line like a fringe or valance to the sea; and then I looked to starboard, and there was the same white fringe, and then to larboard, and the white fringe was there too.  Only those who know the sea know how terrible were Elzevir’s words uttered in such a place.  A moment before I was exalted with, the keen salt wind, and with a hope and freedom that had been strangers for long; but now ’twas all dashed, and death, that is so far off to the young, had moved nearer by fifty years—­was moving a year nearer every minute.

‘We are on a lee shore,’ Elzevir shouted; and I looked and knew what the white fringe was, and that we should be in the breakers in half an hour.  What a whirl of wind and wave and sea, what a whirl of thought and wild conjecture!  What was that land to which we were drifting?  Was it cliff, with deep water and iron face, where a good ship is shattered at a blow, and death comes like a thunder-clap?  Or was it shelving sand, where there is stranding, and the pound, pound, pound of the waves for howls, before she goes to pieces and all is over?

We were in a bay, for there was the long white crescent of surf reaching far away on either side, till it was lost in the dusk, and the brig helpless in the midst of it.  Elzevir had hold of my arm, and gripped it hard as he looked to larboard.  I followed his eyes, and where one horn of the white crescent faded into the mist, caught a dark shadow in the air, and knew it was high land looming behind.  And then the murk and driving rain lifted ever so little, and as it were only for that purpose; and we saw a misty bluff slope down into the sea, like the long head of a basking alligator poised upon the water, and stared into each other’s eyes, and cried together, ‘The Snout!’

It had vanished almost before it was seen, and yet we knew there was no mistake; it was the Snout that was there looming behind the moving rack, and we were in Moonfleet Bay.  Oh, what a rush of thought then came, dazing me with its sweet bitterness, to think that after all these weary years of prison and exile we had come back to Moonfleet!  We were so near to all we loved, so near—­only a mile of broken water—­and yet so far, for death lay between, and we had come back to Moonfleet to die.