“I remember wondering,” Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly, “what would become of the ship’s cat.”

This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments.  Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship’s cat a dozen times.  And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and ended nowhere.

But this time it brought no comment.  Perhaps it served to stir faintly an atrophied analytic sense.  No one of them had yet lost the shudder and the thrill which lay in his own narrative.  But the experiences of the others had begun to bore and irritate.

There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and readjusting silence.

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard.  On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution.  The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.  One on one, another on another, they came, not an instant between.  When they crested, involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock.  When they crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.  Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep.  Not far off, sucked close to a ragged reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.  Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant, then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying, reared and sprang at the rock again.

Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage.  Here and there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into crazy attitudes.  Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the water-line.  Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a ceaseless, grotesque frolic with the foamy waters.  Out of a mass of wood caught between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a woman’s head, livid, rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes straight at their group.  Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in stiff, salt-clogged masses that beat wildly about her face.  Beyond something rocking between two wedged sea-chests, but concealed by them, constantly kicked a sodden foot into the air.  Straight ahead, the naked body of a child flashed to the crest of each wave.

All this destruction ran from north to south between two reefs of black rock.  It edged a broad bow-shaped expanse of sand, snowy, powdery, hummocky, netted with wefts of black seaweed that had dried to a rattling stiffness.  To the east, this silvery crescent merged finally with a furry band of vegetation which screened the whole foreground of the island.