Pausing at the end of a cove, they stood beside their conductor, and
their eyes, now grown accustomed, could make out vaguely the outlines of
the waves.

The throat of the cove was so shoal and narrow, and the mass of the
waves so great, that they reared their heads enormously, just outside,
and spending their strength there, left a lower level within the cove.
Yet sometimes a series of great billows would come straight on, heading
directly for the entrance, and then the surface of the water within was
seen to swell suddenly upward as if by a terrible inward magic of its
own; it rose and rose, as if it would ingulf everything; then as rapidly
sank, and again presented a mere quiet vestibule before the excluded
waves.

They saw in glimpses, as the lightning flashed, the shingly beach,
covered with a mass of creamy foam, all tremulous and fluctuating in
the wind; and this foam was constantly torn away by the gale in great
shreds, that whirled by them as if the very fragments of the ocean were
fleeing from it in terror, to take refuge in the less frightful element
of air.

Still the wild waves reared their heads, like savage, crested animals,
now white, now black, looking in from the entrance of the cove. And now
there silently drifted upon them something higher, vaster, darker than
themselves,--the doomed vessel. It was strange how slowly and steadily
she swept in,--for her broken chain-cable dragged, as it afterwards
proved, and kept her stern-on to the shore,--and they could sometimes
hear amid the tumult a groan that seemed to come from the very heart of
the earth, as she painfully drew her keel over hidden reefs. Over five
of these (as was afterwards found) she had already drifted, and she rose
and fell more than once on the high waves at the very mouth of the cove,
like a wild bird hovering ere it pounces.

Then there came one of those great confluences of waves described
already, which, lifting her bodily upward, higher and higher and higher,
suddenly rushed with her into the basin, filling it like an opened
dry-dock, crashing and roaring round the vessel and upon the rocks, then
sweeping out again and leaving her lodged, still stately and steady, at
the centre of the cove.

They could hear from the crew a mingled sound, that came as a shout
of excitement from some and a shriek of despair from others. The vivid
lightning revealed for a moment those on shipboard to those on
shore; and blinding as it was, it las