He turned toward her, and for a moment his back was to the sea.
"Look," she cried, peering over his shoulder.
He turned his head. What had happened before was child’s play to what met them now.
"My God!" cried Beekman, staring into the white mist, appalled by what he saw.
A wall of water thirty feet high, although, to the man, it looked to be a hundred, was rolling in from seaward with the speed of an express train. Its top was curling, the spray whipping from it, but it was yet an unbroken mass. The thoughts of men take strange turns in such emergencies. It reminded him, for a second, of the pictures in his mother’s Bible of the passage of the Red Sea, the waters a curling wall, concave over the heads of the pursuing Egyptians, about to break.
The words meant nothing to her, but the voice of the man told her that there was death in the moving water.
"Whatever happens, don’t let go of me," he shouted.
He stooped and kicked off his heavy shoes, clasped an arm around the girl’s waist. Her arms met around his neck. He was staring seaward, ready for a plunge. Woman-like, she kissed him, and then the wave struck the island--wall of water meeting wall of rock. For a second, Beekman thought he could feel the massive cliff on which he stood quivering. The next moment the great bore tore its way into the harbor. It leaped and surged through the narrow entrance in a madly foaming, green avalanche. Constricted by the walls, it rose and rose. He had one glimpse of the mighty wave towering above his head where he stood fifty feet above the sea level, and the next moment it broke, and, with a crash like a thousand thunderbolts, fell upon them.
The crest of the wave was traveling faster than its middle section, which had been retarded by the land. That fact, and that alone, saved the lives of the two poor mites upon whom it fell, for, instead of being dashed back against the rock wall by the terrific surge of the inward sweeping sea, the wave curling above their heads struck the wall a second in advance of the great body of water. It broke, fell upon them, swept them from the shelf, plunged them into the depths with such force and violence that it was the return thrust of the water which finally caught them--the backward undertow, rather than the inward rush.