in every movement by driving rain,
flying scud, intense blackness and flapping oilskins.

When they had reached the coast and mounted the rough stone steps
leading to the elevated look-out tower, a clear sweep of the dark,
foam-crested surface was obtained, and the news was shouted above the
roar of the gale that somewhere out in the night, amid the tormented
waters, a ship was in distress, though the flying spray made it
impossible to locate the exact direction.

Below the signal tower, and built on a mass of rock projecting into the
half-sheltered water inside the concrete pier, was the life-boat house.
From this point the white rays of a chemical flare lighted up the
surface of the sea as far as the harbour bar, which, with its flanking
rocks, resembled a seething cauldron. Into this the life-boat plunged
from its inclined slipway, and was almost instantly swallowed up in the
outer ring of darkness and spray. The flare died out suddenly and the
night seemed even blacker than before.

After a brief struggle with the wind, now blowing at a speed of over
seventy miles an hour, the men who had assembled around the signal
station made their way out on to the spray-swept breakwater, and there
waited for the coloured rocket from the life-boat which would signify
that she had found the wreck.

Nearly an hour passed but no sign came from the darkness and boiling
sea. Then a light appeared momentarily on the harbour bar and was lost
in the smother of white. A few minutes later a grinding crash came from
the rocks less than a hundred yards distant from the end of the
breakwater.

The groups of sailors standing under the lee of the wall, chafing at
their apparent helplessness and gazing anxiously out to sea, were
suddenly electrified into action by a few sharp orders from the
oilskinned commander. A minute or two of seemingly inextricable
confusion resulted in the beams of a portable searchlight flashing out
from the spray-swept breakwater and lighting up rocks, foam, and a big
three-masted Norwegian sailing ship, with sails torn, her fore-mast
broken off short and every sea lifting high her stern and driving her
farther on to the half-hidden tongues of stone. Even as the light played
on her she heeled over to starboard at an angle of about forty-five
degrees with an ominous rending of timbers which sounded above the roar
of wind and surf.

Orders were bellowed through a megaphone, and again men moved quickly in
all dire