here were comparatively trifling, and
the shock was not likely to be very severe. For the rest, he had little
time to spare for reflection upon this mishap. Every variety of danger
was arising at once; the tempest was concentrated upon the vulnerable
point; destruction was imminent.

The darkness was profound for a moment: the lightnings paused--a sort of
sinister connivance. The cloud and the sea became one: there was a dull
peal.

This was followed by a terrible outburst. The frame which formed the
front of the barriers was swept away. The fragments of beams were
visible in the rolling waters. The sea was using the first breakwater as
an engine for making a breach in the second.

Gilliatt experienced the feeling of a general who sees his advanced
guard driven in.

The second construction of beams resisted the shock. The apparatus
behind it was powerfully secured and buttressed. But the broken frame
was heavy, and was at the mercy of the waves, which were incessantly
hurling it forward and withdrawing it. The ropes and chains which
remained unsevered prevented its entirely breaking up, and the qualities
which Gilliatt had given it as a means of defence made it, in the end, a
more effective weapon of destruction. Instead of a buckler, it had
become a battering-ram. Besides this, it was now full of irregularities
from breaking; ends of timbers projected from all parts; and it was, as
it were, covered with teeth and spikes. No sort of arm could have been
more effective, or more fitted for the handling of the tempest. It was
the projectile, while the sea played the part of the catapult.

The blows succeeded each other with a dismal regularity. Gilliatt,
thoughtful and anxious, behind that barricaded portal, listened to the
sound of death knocking loudly for admittance.

He reflected with bitterness that, but for the fatal entanglement of the
funnel of the Durande in the wreck, he would have been at that very
moment, and even since the morning, once more at Guernsey, in the port,
with the sloop out of danger and with the machinery saved.

The dreaded moment arrived. The destruction was complete. There was a
sound like a death-rattle. The entire frame of the breakwater, the
double apparatus crushed and mingled confusedly, came in a whirl of
foam, rushing upon the stone barricade like chaos upon a mountain, where
it stopped. Here the fragments lay together, a mass of beams penetrable
by the waves, but still breaking t