“It was that old woman I remember,” said Honey Smith.  There were bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey’s body.  There was a falsetto whistling to Honey’s voice.  “That Irish granny!  She didn’t say a word.  Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell.  Then the wave struck!” He paused.  He tried to control the falsetto whistling.  But it got away from him.  “God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!”

“That was the awful thing about it,” Pete Murphy groaned.  It was as inevitable now as an antiphonal chorus.  Pete’s little scarred, scratched, bleeding body rocked back and forth.”  The women and children!  But it all came so quick.  I was close beside ‘the Newlyweds.’  She put her arms around his neck and said, ’Your face’ll be the last I’ll look on in this life, dearest!  ’And she stayed there looking into his eyes.  It was the last face she saw all right.”  Pete stopped and his brow blackened. " While she was sick in her stateroom, he’d been looking into a good many faces besides hers, the — "

“I don’t seem to remember anything definite about it,” Billy Fairfax said.  It was strange to hear that beating pulse of horror in Billy’s mild tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face.  “I had the same feeling that I’ve had in nightmares lots of times — that it was horrible — and — I didn’t think I could stand it another moment — but — of course it would soon end — like all nightmares and I’d wake up.”

Without reason, they fell again into silence.

They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the sea spewed them up.  When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little terror-stricken, gibbering group.  At first they babbled.  At first inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives, exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion.  It was as though mentally they slavered.  But every phrase, however confused and inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful buffeting and their terrific final struggle.  And every clause, whether sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be.  All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast.

Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.

With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned.  They still iterated and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually grew to consistence.  In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks of dumbness.