With the dawning, Elderkin was unlashed and took the wheel himself, aided by a seaman, for it took two men to stand its kicking. To him came Olsen, still phlegmatic, almost as black as one of his dago squad. Gripping the poop-rail with one hand, with the other he laid hold of the captain's oilskin, and leant as near as possible to shout his news, but even so Elderkin could only catch a word here and there.
"Won't stand . . . stays parting . . ." came to him.
But a sudden shout came from Olsen, while the man at the wheel literally turned colour and closed his eyes. Only Elderkin, with a look that seemed queerly of exultation on his face, stared ahead to where a vast wall of water, so high it glimmered greenly, was rolling towards them over the broken, tossing sea. That was exactly what it looked like, as though it were a body distinct and separate from the rest of the raging water, some great fold pushed up from the Antarctic region and urged across the ocean, on and on. . . . It bore down on the infinitesimal ship and her clinging ants of crew, bore down, blotting out the sky, till suddenly it was so near it became one with the rest of the sea, as though the whole surface were curving over into a hollow sphere. It thundered upon them; then, its glassy concavity reared to an incredible height, it toppled over and broke in one roaring cataract of foam.
What happened next no one remaining in the _Spirito Santo_ could ever have told. Three men were washed overboard; one had his legs so broken that the splintered bones drove into the deck where he was hurled down. There were a few long-drawn seconds when all thought she had gone under, for the rushing sea had climbed level with the chart-house roof, while the air was so thick with spume and spray it would have been difficult to say where the sea left off being solid and became fused with the wind. Then, with a roaring and a sucking like that when a wave, shattered, streams off a cliff, the water poured off decks and hatches in long lacings of dazzling white. The _Spirito Santo_ still lived.
But it seemed she was mortally wounded, for she was jarring all her length, even the twisted stanchions vibrated as though some malignant force within her had broken loose; and when Elderkin tried to bring her head up to the wind, the wheel spun in his hands as easily and uselessly as a child's toy.