t ground and crunched against a boss of
the cliff. Above the boss was a cleft. He wanted to know if I would
dare the leap from the mast-head into the cleft. Sometimes the distance
was a scant six feet. At other times it was a score, for the mast reeled
drunkenly to the rolling and pounding of the hull on which rested its
splintered butt.

I began the climb. But they did not wait. One by one they unlashed
themselves and followed me up the perilous mast. There was reason for
haste, for at any moment the _Sparwehr_ might slip off into deep water. I
timed my leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a scramble and ready
to lend a hand to those who leaped after. It was slow work. We were wet
and half freezing in the wind-drive. Besides, the leaps had to be timed
to the roll of the hull and the sway of the mast.

The cook was the first to go. He was snapped off the mast-end, and his
body performed cart-wheels in its fall. A fling of sea caught him and
crushed him to a pulp against the cliff. The cabin boy, a bearded man of
twenty-odd, lost hold, slipped, swung around the mast, and was pinched
against the boss of rock. Pinched? The life squeezed from him on the
instant. Two others followed the way of the cook. Captain Johannes
Maartens was the last, completing the fourteen of us that clung on in the
cleft. An hour afterward the _Sparwehr_ slipped off and sank in deep
water.

Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for there was
way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat found us. The
men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long hair done up in a
curious knot on their pates--the marriage knot, as I was afterward to
learn, and also, as I was to learn, a handy thing to clutch hold of with
one hand whilst you clouted with the other when an argument went beyond
words.

The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers,
most of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down.
They were a poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the
stomach of a sea-cuny to countenance. Their rice was brown as chocolate.
Half the husks remained in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and
unidentifiable dirt which made one pause often in the chewing in order to
stick into his mouth thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending
stuff. Also, they ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding
variety and ungodly hot.

Their hou