CHAPTER XV.

PORTENTOSUM MARE.

Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches.  They were ignorant of their whereabouts, they could scarcely see a cable’s length around.  Despite a furious storm of hail which forced them to bend down their heads, the women had obstinately refused to go below again.  No one, however hopeless, but wishes, if shipwreck be inevitable, to meet it in the open air.  When so near death, a ceiling above one’s head seems like the first outline of a coffin.

They were now in a short and chopping sea.  A turgid sea indicates its constraint.  Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the boiling-like appearance of the waves.  And thus it was, for they were unconsciously coasting Aurigny.  Between the west of Ortach and the Caskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, and the uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms.  The sea suffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable.  That channel is a thing to fear.

The Matutina was in it.

Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the Champs Elysees, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment a reef.  Such is the western approach of Aurigny.  The sea covers and conceals this ship-wrecking apparatus.  On this conglomeration of submarine breakers the cloven waves leap and foam—­in calm weather, a chopping sea; in storms, a chaos.

The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavouring to explain it to themselves.  Suddenly they understood it.  A pale vista broadened in the zenith; a wan tinge overspread the sea; the livid light revealed on the port side a long shoal stretching eastward, towards which the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel.  The shoal was Aurigny.

What was that shoal?  They shuddered.  They would have shuddered even more had a voice answered them—­Aurigny.

No isle so well defended against man’s approach as Aurigny.  Below and above water it is protected by a savage guard, of which Ortach is the outpost.  To the west, Burhou, Sauteriaux, Anfroque, Niangle, Fond du Croc, Les Jumelles, La Grosse, La Clanque, Les Eguillons, Le Vrac, La Fosse-Maliere; to the east, Sauquet, Hommeau Floreau, La Brinebetais, La Queslingue, Croquelihou, La Fourche, Le Saut, Noire Pute, Coupie, Orbue.  These are hydra-monsters of the species reef.

One of these reefs is called Le But, the goal, as if to imply that every voyage ends there.

This obstruction of rocks, simplified by night and sea, appeared to the shipwrecked men in the shape of a single dark band, a sort of black blot on the horizon.