While this gruesome fear restrained the ready words on the tip of my tongue, Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight.

At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn.  I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall.  In one stride I penetrated it.  Such must have been the darkness before creation.  It had closed behind me.  I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm.  Neither could I see anything.  He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood.  And every form was gone, too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night.

A flash of lightning would have been a relief—­I mean physically.  I would have prayed for it if it hadn’t been for my shrinking apprehension of the thunder.  In the tension of silence I was suffering from it seemed to me that the first crash must turn me into dust.

And thunder was, most likely, what would happen next.  Stiff all over and hardly breathing, I waited with a horribly strained expectation.  Nothing happened.  It was maddening, but a dull, growing ache in the lower part of my face made me aware that I had been grinding my teeth madly enough, for God knows how long.

It’s extraordinary I should not have heard myself doing it; but I hadn’t.  By an effort which absorbed all my faculties I managed to keep my jaw still.  It required much attention, and while thus engaged I became bothered by curious, irregular sounds of faint tapping on the deck.  They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups.  While I wondered at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek.  Raindrops.  Enormous.  Forerunners of something.  Tap.  Tap.  Tap. . . .

I turned about, and, addressing Gambrel earnestly, entreated him to “hang on to the wheel.”  But I could hardly speak from emotion.  The fatal moment had come.  I held my breath.  The tapping had stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw.  I don’t suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my conviction that there was nothing else for it but to scream.

Suddenly—­how am I to convey it?  Well, suddenly the darkness turned into water.  This is the only suitable figure.  A heavy shower, a downpour, comes along, making a noise.  You hear its approach on the sea, in the air, too, I verily believe.  But this was different.  With no preliminary whisper or rustle, without a splash, and even without the ghost of impact, I became instantaneously soaked to the skin.  Not a very difficult matter, since I was wearing only my sleeping suit.  My hair got full of water in an instant, water streamed on my skin, it filled my nose, my ears, my eyes.  In a fraction of a second I swallowed quite a lot of it.