So an hour or two went by; up above the dawn broke and the daylight came. Van Rensselaer was still howling, though so weak that he could scarcely stagger, when the cabin door was flung wide again, and the captain, white, and with set lips, came in. "It is all over, sir," he said. "We are lost."  
The owner's eyes were glaring like a maniac's. "What do you mean?" he shrieked.
 
"Come up and see," was the reply, and van Rensselaer rushed blindly to the deck. Clinging to the companionway door, he stared about him, dazed at first, and realizing nothing but his own horror. A mad chaos was about him; the yacht was like a bubble tossed about by the gigantic seas; the waves were like mountains around her. Down into a great valley she sank, down—down—plunging,[133] and van Rensselaer gasped in fear; and then a great rolling mountain came sweeping down over her, and up she rose—higher and higher—to the very crest, and sped along with the speed of an express train, the mad waters seething and hissing and roaring and thundering around her.
 
From the mountain top van Rensselaer gazed about him—and his cries died in his throat. Not half a mile away, right upon them, as it looked, was the shore—the wild, lonely, horrible shore—the shore with the jagged rocks and the merciless iron cliffs—and destruction, imminent and inevitable!
 
The sight took the last atom of the soul out of van Rensselaer. He whimpered, he wailed, he would have fallen down upon the deck and grovelled but that instinct made him cling to his support. To stand there alive and safe, and be swept thus to death, foot by foot! To be helpless in the grip of these grim, relentless forces; it was too much, it was too much! It made him[134] hysterical, it turned him into a beast, into a fool. He screamed, he laughed, he sobbed; but the words he spoke no longer had meaning.
 
His eyes were fixed upon the black rocks before them; as they came nearer he heard the sounds made by the mountains of water hurled against them,—a sound far-reaching, all-pervading, elemental, cosmic. Only once he turned elsewhere, to see the crew flinging out their anchors in a ............