irection can be easily managed, or
at least are possible even in the most violent collisions. There is a
brute in the tempest. The hurricane is a bull, and can be turned.

The whole secret of avoiding shipwreck is to try and pass from the
secant to the tangent.

Such was the service rendered by the beam to the vessel. It had done the
work of an oar, had taken the place of a rudder. But the manoeuvre once
performed could not be repeated. The beam was overboard; the shock of
the collision had wrenched it out of the men's hands, and it was lost in
the waves. To loosen another beam would have been to dislocate the hull.

The hurricane carried off the _Matutina_. Presently the Caskets showed
as a harmless encumbrance on the horizon. Nothing looks more out of
countenance than a reef of rocks under such circumstances. There are in
nature, in its obscure aspects, in which the visible blends with the
invisible, certain motionless, surly profiles, which seem to express
that a prey has escaped.

Thus glowered the Caskest while the _Matutina_ fled.

The lighthouse paled in distance, faded, and disappeared.

There was something mournful in its extinction. Layers of mist sank down
upon the now uncertain light. Its rays died in the waste of waters; the
flame floated, struggled, sank, and lost its form. It might have been a
drowning creature. The brasier dwindled to the snuff of a candle; then
nothing; more but a weak, uncertain flutter. Around it spread a circle
of extravasated glimmer; it was like the quenching of: light in the pit
of night.

The bell which had threatened was dumb. The lighthouse which had
threatened had melted away. And yet it was more awful now that they had
ceased to threaten. One was a voice, the other a torch. There was
something human about them.

They were gone, and nought remained but the abyss.

CHAPTER XIII.

FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT.

Again was the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness.

The _Matutina_, escaped from the Caskets, sank and rose from billow to
billow. A respite, but in chaos.

Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave,
she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea. She scarcely pitched at
all--a terrible symptom of a ship's distress. Wrecks merely roll.
Pitching is a convulsion of the strife. The helm alone can turn a vessel
to the wind.

In storms, and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night
end by melti