Thus glowered the Caskest while the Matutina fled.

The lighthouse paled in distance, faded, and disappeared.

There was something mournful in its extinction.  Layers of mist sank down upon the now uncertain light.  Its rays died in the waste of waters; the flame floated, struggled, sank, and lost its form.  It might have been a drowning creature.  The brasier dwindled to the snuff of a candle; then nothing; more but a weak, uncertain flutter.  Around it spread a circle of extravasated glimmer; it was like the quenching of:  light in the pit of night.

The bell which had threatened was dumb.  The lighthouse which had threatened had melted away.  And yet it was more awful now that they had ceased to threaten.  One was a voice, the other a torch.  There was something human about them.

They were gone, and nought remained but the abyss.

CHAPTER XIII.

FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT.

Again was the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness.

The Matutina, escaped from the Caskets, sank and rose from billow to billow.  A respite, but in chaos.

Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave, she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea.  She scarcely pitched at all—­a terrible symptom of a ship’s distress.  Wrecks merely roll.  Pitching is a convulsion of the strife.  The helm alone can turn a vessel to the wind.

In storms, and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night end by melting into amalgamation, resolving into nothing but a smoke.  Mists, whirlwinds, gales, motion in all directions, no basis, no shelter, no stop.  Constant recommencement, one gulf succeeding another.  No horizon visible; intense blackness for background.  Through all these the hooker drifted.

To have got free of the Caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory for the shipwrecked men; but it was a victory which left them in stupor.  They had raised no cheer:  at sea such an imprudence is not repeated twice.  To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead, would have been too serious a jest.

The repulse of the rock was an impossibility achieved.  They were petrified by it.  By degrees, however, they began to hope again.  Such are the insubmergable mirages of the soul!  There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.  These poor wretches were ready to acknowledge to themselves that they were saved.  It was on their lips.

But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness.

On the port bow arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss.  They watched it open-mouthed.

The storm was driving them towards it.

They knew not what it was.  It was the Ortach rock.