Helpless they clung to the standing rigging, to the transoms, to the shank painters, to the gaskets, to the broken planks, the protruding nails of which tore their hands, to the warped riders, and to all the rugged projections of the stumps of the masts.  From time to time they listened.  The toll of the bell came over the waters fainter and fainter; one would have thought that it also was in distress.  Its ringing was no more than an intermittent rattle.  Then this rattle died away.  Where were they?  At what distance from the buoy?  The sound of the bell had frightened them; its silence terrified them.  The north-wester drove them forward in perhaps a fatal course.  They felt themselves wafted on by maddened and ever-recurring gusts of wind.  The wreck sped forward in the darkness.  There is nothing more fearful than being hurried forward blindfold.  They felt the abyss before them, over them, under them.  It was no longer a run, it was a rush.

Suddenly, through the appalling density of the snowstorm, there loomed a red light.

“A lighthouse!” cried the crew.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CASKETS.

It was indeed the Caskets light.

A lighthouse of the nineteenth century is a high cylinder of masonry, surmounted by scientifically constructed machinery for throwing light.  The Caskets lighthouse in particular is a triple white tower, bearing three light-rooms.  These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels, with such precision that the man on watch who sees them from sea can invariably take ten steps during their irradiation, and twenty-five during their eclipse.  Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide simple lenses in range, having above and below it two series of dioptric rings; an algebraic gear, secured from the effects of the beating of winds and waves by glass a millimetre thick[6], yet sometimes broken by the sea-eagles, which dash themselves like great moths against these gigantic lanterns.  The building which encloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed.  Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct.  A lighthouse is a mathematical figure.

In the seventeenth century a lighthouse was a sort of plume of the land on the seashore.  The architecture of a lighthouse tower was magnificent and extravagant.  It was covered with balconies, balusters, lodges, alcoves, weathercocks.  Nothing but masks, statues, foliage, volutes, reliefs, figures large and small, medallions with inscriptions. Pax in bello, said the Eddystone lighthouse.  We may as well observe, by the way, that this declaration of peace did not always disarm the ocean.  Winstanley repeated it on a lighthouse which he constructed at his own expense, on a wild spot near Plymouth.  The tower being finished, he shut himself up in it to have it