glided by, or was
carried back--though some forty yards adrift of the transport--he
could do nothing more than tread water and so manage to keep himself
afloat.

Borne through the murky grime, along that water there came now the
swish of oars and the voices of men speaking in French--French
strongly accentuated and in the Manche _patois_. What were they doing,
he wondered. Had they come out to save some of the burning transports
and boats, to endeavour to stop the flames and also the firing of the
guns by the heat--their own guns that, as they fired, hurled their
charges on their own shore? Were they going to meet their dooms
unknowingly by venturing on that very place of death which he had just
escaped from?

It might be--might well be so; and though he had fought against
them--though they were Frenchmen and his enemies, too, he must warn
them, save them, if he could: they were men, human beings; he could
not let them go unwittingly to such an awful end as this, could not
let them board that ship and meet the fate he had avoided. Therefore
he hailed them as loudly as he was able, screamed to them, besought
them to enter no vessel near; above all to avoid the burning
transport. But whether they understood him, even if they heard, he
could not guess; he caught still the beat of the oars upon the waves,
heard their chattering voices, even one or two of their expressions;
and then, as the tide took him nearer and nearer to the shore, he lost
sound of those voices altogether.

"Strange," he muttered, "strange she blows not up--many minutes have
elapsed since I quitted her--twenty at the least, and yet the
explosion has not come. They may have boarded her, those men, have
extinguished the flames: there may have been no powder left in the
mag--Ah!"

There came an awful roar as he so muttered, a roar such as he had
heard twenty times in as many hours; a hundred feet above and behind
him, as he turned swiftly in the water, he saw a fan-shaped mass of
flame ascending to the skies; he saw black objects amid that mass of
flame--what were they, beams, masts, or human bodies?--he saw the
smoke rent open, and great pieces of the transport floating or falling
on to the waters with terrific crashes. Then there rushed down on him
a fresh mountain of blood-coloured smoke, with blazing cinders and
pieces of burning wood, and smouldering sails all borne along in its
midst, and it enveloped him and choked him, while the burning matte