They tumbled over and over, tightening their hug.  Suddenly the water let them down with a brutal bang; and, stranded against the side of the wheelhouse, out of breath and bruised, they were left to stagger up in the wind and hold on where they could.

Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as though he had escaped some unparalleled outrage directed at his feelings.  It weakened his faith in himself.  He started shouting aimlessly to the man he could feel near him in that fiendish blackness, “Is it you, sir?  Is it you, sir?” till his temples seemed ready to burst.  And he heard in answer a voice, as if crying far away, as if screaming to him fretfully from a very great distance, the one word “Yes!” Other seas swept again over the bridge.  He received them defencelessly right over his bare head, with both his hands engaged in holding.

The motion of the ship was extravagant.  Her lurches had an appalling helplessness:  she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time.  When she rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted back by such a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a clubbed man reels before he collapses.  The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully.  At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end.  And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron.  Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things coolly.

The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night.  And on this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast.  This was all he could see of his ship.  Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with the fear of being swept overboard together with the whole thing in one great crash—­her middle structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a coast.  It was like an outlying rock with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating round—­like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people cling before they let go—­only it rose, it sank, it rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing upon the sea.