“Yes,” she nodded, and smiled in his face, though faintly like one dying.  He passed one arm around the middle stay of the shrouds and around her waist, passed the other in front of her, covering her chest; and so, with every muscle set, he waited.

Surrounded, pursued, pushed, and hammered by the billows, the wreck drifted, rising and falling, starting and wallowing toward the awful line where the breakers plunged over the undertow and dashed themselves to death on the resounding shore.  There was a wide debatable ground between land and water.  One moment it belonged to earth, the next lofty curling surges foamed howling over it; then the undertow was flying back in savage torrents.  Would the hawser reach across this flux and reflux of death?  Would the mast hold against the grounding shock?  Would the sling work?

They lurched nearer; the shock was close at hand; every one set teeth and tightened grip.  Lifted on a monstrous billow, which was itself lifted by the undertow and the shelving of the beach, the hulk seemed as if it were held aloft by some demon in order that it might be dashed to pieces.  But the wave lost its hold, swept under the keel, staggered wildly up the slope, broke in a huge white deafening roll, and rushed backward in torrents.  The brig was between two forces; it struck once, but not heavily; then, raised by the incoming surge, it struck again; there was an awful consciousness and uproar of beating and grinding; the next instant it was on its beam ends and covered with cataracts.

Every one aboard was submerged.  Thurstane and Clara were overwhelmed by such a mass of water that they thought themselves at the bottom of the sea.  Two men who had not mounted the rigging, but tried to cling to the boat davits, were hurled adrift and sent to agonize in the undertow.  The brig trembled as if it were on the point of breaking up and dissolving in the horrible, furious yeast of breakers.  Even to the people on shore the moment and the spectacle were sublime and tremendous beyond description.  The vessel and the people on board disappeared for a time from their sight under jets and cascades of surf.  The spray rose in a dense sheet as high as the maintopmast would have been had it stood upright.

When Thurstane came out of his state of temporary drowning, he was conscious of two sailors clambering by him toward the top, and heard a shout in his ears of “Cast loose.”

It was the captain.  He had sprung alongside of Clara, and was already unwinding her lashings.  Thrice before the job was done they were buried in surf, and during the third trial they had to hold on with their hands, the two men clasping the girl desperately and pressing her against the rigging.  It was a wonder that she and all of them were not disabled, for the jamming of the water was enough to break bones.

They got her up a few ratlines; then came another surge, during which they gripped hard; then there was a second ascent, and so on.  The climbing was the easier and the holding on the more difficult, because the mast was depressed to a low angle, its summit being hardly ten feet higher than its base.  Even in the top there was a desperate struggle with the sea, and even after Clara was in the sling she was half drowned by the surf.