le thus engaged I
became bothered by curious, irregular sounds of faint tapping on the
deck. They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups. While I wondered
at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left
eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek. Raindrops. Enormous.
Forerunners of something. Tap. Tap. Tap. . . .

I turned about, and, addressing Gambrel earnestly, entreated him to
"hang on to the wheel." But I could hardly speak from emotion. The
fatal moment had come. I held my breath. The tapping had stopped
as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of
intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking
screw. I don't suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my
conviction that there was nothing else for it but to scream.

Suddenly--how am I to convey it? Well, suddenly the darkness turned into
water. This is the only suitable figure. A heavy shower, a downpour,
comes along, making a noise. You hear its approach on the sea, in the
air, too, I verily believe. But this was different. With no preliminary
whisper or rustle, without a splash, and even without the ghost
of impact, I became instantaneously soaked to the skin. Not a very
difficult matter, since I was wearing only my sleeping suit. My hair
got full of water in an instant, water streamed on my skin, it filled
my nose, my ears, my eyes. In a fraction of a second I swallowed quite a
lot of it.

As to Gambril, he was fairly choked. He coughed pitifully, the broken
cough of a sick man; and I beheld him as one sees a fish in an aquarium
by the light of an electric bulb, an elusive, phosphorescent shape. Only
he did not glide away. But something else happened. Both binnaclelamps
went out. I suppose the water forced itself into them, though I wouldn't
have thought that possible, for they fitted into the cowl perfectly.

The last gleam of light in the universe had gone, pursued by a low
exclamation of dismay from Gambril. I groped for him and seized his arm.
How startlingly wasted it was.

"Never mind," I said. "You don't want the light. All you need to do
is to keep the wind, when it comes, at the back of your head. You
understand?"

"Aye, aye, sir. . . . But I should like to have a light," he added
nervously.

All that time the ship lay as steady as a rock. The noise of the water
pouring off the sails and spars, flowing over the break of the poop, had
stopped short. The poop scupp