How to double that cape?  There were no means of doing it.

Just as they had seen, first the Caskets, then Ortach, rise before them, they now saw the point of Aurigny, all of steep rock.  It was like a number of giants, rising up one after another—­a series of frightful duels.

Charybdis and Scylla are but two; the Caskets, Ortach, and Aurigny are three.

The phenomenon of the horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus repeated with the grand monotony of the abyss.  The battles of the ocean have the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer.

Each wave, as they neared it, added twenty cubits to the cape, awfully magnified by the mist; the fast decreasing distance seemed more inevitable—­they were touching the skirts of the race!  The first fold which seized them would drag them in—­another wave surmounted, and all would be over.

Suddenly the hooker was driven back, as by the blow of a Titan’s fist.  The wave reared up under the vessel and fell back, throwing the waif back in its mane of foam.  The Matutina, thus impelled, drifted away from Aurigny.

She was again on the open sea.

Whence had come the succour?  From the wind.  The breath of the storm had changed its direction.

The wave had played with them; now it was the wind’s turn.  They had saved themselves from the Caskets.  Off Ortach it was the wave which had been their friend.  Now it was the wind.  The wind had suddenly veered from north to south.  The sou’-wester had succeeded the nor’-wester.

The current is the wind in the waters; the wind is the current in the air.  These two forces had just counteracted each other, and it had been the wind’s will to snatch its prey from the current.

The sudden fantasies of ocean are uncertain.  They are, perhaps, an embodiment of the perpetual, when at their mercy man must neither hope nor despair.  They do and they undo.  The ocean amuses itself.  Every shade of wild, untamed ferocity is phased in the vastness of that cunning sea, which Jean Bart used to call the “great brute.”  To its claws and their gashings succeed soft intervals of velvet paws.  Sometimes the storm hurries on a wreck, at others it works out the problem with care; it might almost be said that it caresses it.  The sea can afford to take its time, as men in their agonies find out.

We must own that occasionally these lulls of the torture announce deliverance.  Such cases are rare.  However this may be, men in extreme peril are quick to believe in rescue; the slightest pause in the storm’s threats is sufficient; they tell themselves that they are out of danger.  After believing themselves buried, they declare their resurrection; they feverishly embrace what they do not yet possess; it is clear that the bad luck has turned; they declare themselves satisfied; they are saved; they cry quits with God.  They should not be in so great a hurry to give receipts to the Unknown.