“Starboard the helm—­starboard yet—­now meet her—­so!” and, as she rounded to Jack and he kept hauling the sheets aft, and the boat, her course and trim altered, darted among the breakers like a brave man attacking danger.  After the first plunge she went up and down like a pickax, coming down almost where she went up; but she held her course, with the waves roaring round her like a pack of hell-hounds.

More than half the terrible strip was passed.  “Starboard yet,” cried David; and she headed toward the high mainland under whose lee was calm and safety.  Alas! at this moment a snorter of a sea broke under her broadside, and hove her to leeward like a cork, and a tide eddy catching her under the counter, she came to more than two points, and her canvas, thus emptied, shook enough to tear the masts out of her by the board.

“Port your helm!  PORT!  PORT!” roared David, in a voice like the roar of a wounded lion; and, in his anxiety, he bounded to the helm himself; but Lucy obeyed orders at half a word, and David, seeing this, sprang forward to help Jack flatten in the foresheet.  The boat, which all through answered the helm beautifully, fell off the moment Lucy ported the helm, and thus they escaped the impending and terrible danger of her making sternway.  “Helm amidships!” and all drew again:  the black water was in sight.  But will they ever reach it?  She tosses like a cork.  Bang!  A breaker caught her bows, and drenched David and Jack to the very bone.  She quivered like an aspen-leaf but held on.

“Starboard one point,” cried David, sitting down, and lifting an oar out from the boat; but just as Lucy, in obeying the order, leaned a little over the lee gunwale with the tiller, a breaker broke like a shell upon the boat’s broadside abaft, stove in her upper plank, and filled her with water; some flew and slapped Lucy in the face like an open hand.  She screamed, but clung to the gunwale, and griped the helm:  her arm seemed iron, and her heart was steel.  While she clung thus to her work, blinded by the spray, and expecting death, she heard oars splash into the water, and mellow stentorian voices burst out singing.

In amazement she turned, squeezed the brine out of her eyes, and looked all round, and lo! the boat was in a trifling bobble of a sea, and close astern was the surge of fire raging, and growling, and blazing in vain, and the two sailors were pulling the boat, with superhuman strength and inspiration, into a monster mill-pool that now lay right ahead, black as ink and smooth as oil, singing loudly as they rowed: 

         “Cheerily oh oh! (pull) cheerily oh oh! (pull)
          To port we go oh (pull), to port we go (pull).”

FLARE!! a great flaming eye opened on them in the center of the universal blackness.

“Look! look!” cried Lucy; “a fire in the mountain.”