Through a jagged aperture in the dome of clouds the light of a few stars fell upon the black sea, rising and falling confusedly.  Sometimes the head of a watery cone would topple on board and mingle with the rolling flurry of foam on the swamped deck; and the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily at the bottom of a circular cistern of clouds.  This ring of dense vapours, gyrating madly round the calm of the centre, encompassed the ship like a motionless and unbroken wall of an aspect inconceivably sinister.  Within, the sea, as if agitated by an internal commotion, leaped in peaked mounds that jostled each other, slapping heavily against her sides; and a low moaning sound, the infinite plaint of the storm’s fury, came from beyond the limits of the menacing calm.  Captain MacWhirr remained silent, and Jukes’ ready ear caught suddenly the faint, long-drawn roar of some immense wave rushing unseen under that thick blackness, which made the appalling boundary of his vision.

“Of course,” he started resentfully, “they thought we had caught at the chance to plunder them.  Of course!  You said—­pick up the money.  Easier said than done.  They couldn’t tell what was in our heads.  We came in, smash—­right into the middle of them.  Had to do it by a rush.”

“As long as it’s done . . . ,” mumbled the Captain, without attempting to look at Jukes.  “Had to do what’s fair.”

“We shall find yet there’s the devil to pay when this is over,” said Jukes, feeling very sore.  “Let them only recover a bit, and you’ll see.  They will fly at our throats, sir.  Don’t forget, sir, she isn’t a British ship now.  These brutes know it well, too.  The damned Siamese flag.”

“We are on board, all the same,” remarked Captain MacWhirr.

“The trouble’s not over yet,” insisted Jukes, prophetically, reeling and catching on.  “She’s a wreck,” he added, faintly.

“The trouble’s not over yet,” assented Captain MacWhirr, half aloud . . . .  “Look out for her a minute.”

“Are you going off the deck, sir?” asked Jukes, hurriedly, as if the storm were sure to pounce upon him as soon as he had been left alone with the ship.

He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleams of distant worlds.  She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam—­and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest.  It ceased suddenly.  The still air moaned.  Above Jukes’ head a few stars shone into a pit of black vapours.  The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky.  The stars, too, seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.