378 
WE LOOK UPON A THREATENING SCENE. 
are losing ground, and there is not much of it between 
us and those ” 
lie pointed to the dark and towering masses of the 
loosely-piled rock, up whose rugged sides the bruised and 
foaming sea reared its rushing surface, and through 
whose broken breast it urged its half-spent fury. No 
gravity existed there of sufRcent power to drag the 
broken waters to a common level : they rolled, and 
leaped, and surged in their mad course until obstructed 
by those hoary upheavals of nature’s past convulsions, 
and then pressed up their precipitous sides, or through 
dark and gloomy-looking archways, with a baffled power 
that told of ruin, and destruction, and death, to the hap- 
less ship that should be swept with them in their mad 
career. 
The general view which met the eye was awful to 
behold. 
t 
Imagine a ship drifting with the swift current of an i' ■ 
expansive river to be suddenly arrested by an unex- 
pected sandbank. The ship must now stand still : she is 
stranded. The current can sweep her no farther; it there- 
fore rears itself against her slanting side, and, rushing 
around both stem and stern, forms dozens of turbid 
whirlpools under her lee. Now it presses up her side, 
now sinks below the general level, now leaps in broken 
masses up to her very gunwale, and all the Avhile gurgling 
and foaming in the unsteady eddy under her lee. Ima- 
gine such a scene as this, I say, and then multiply it a 
hundredfold, and you will have a tolerable idea of the 
one from which our old ship was now straining every 
nerve to deliver us. Only in our case the expansive 
