mboat had
lowered its boats. As the time went by I marvelled that I was still
alive. I had no sensation whatever in my lower limbs, while a chilling
numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into it. Small waves,
with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and into my
mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.

The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing chorus
of screams in the distance, and knew that the _Martinez_ had gone down.
Later,--how much later I have no knowledge,--I came to myself with a
start of fear. I was alone. I could hear no calls or cries--only the
sound of the waves, made weirdly hollow and reverberant by the fog. A
panic in a crowd, which partakes of a sort of community of interest, is
not so terrible as a panic when one is by oneself; and such a panic I now
suffered. Whither was I drifting? The red-faced man had said that the
tide was ebbing through the Golden Gate. Was I, then, being carried out
to sea? And the life-preserver in which I floated? Was it not liable to
go to pieces at any moment? I had heard of such things being made of
paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
buoyancy. And I could not swim a stroke. And I was alone, floating,
apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness. I confess that a
madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and
beat the water with my numb hands.

How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of
which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful
sleep. When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw,
almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three
triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind.
Where the bow cut the water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I
seemed directly in its path. I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.
The bow plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
over my head. Then the long, black side of the vessel began slipping
past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands. I tried to
reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my nails, but my
arms were heavy and lifeless. Again I strove to call out, but made no
sound.

The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow
between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at t