Marble
that he might unconsciously pull into a roller, and capsize, induced
him to wait for day.
The dawn appeared at last, after two or three of the longest hours I
remember ever to have passed. Never shall I forget the species of
furious eagerness with which we gazed about us. In the first place, we
got an outline of the adjacent land; then, as light diffused itself
more and more into the atmosphere, we caught glimpses of its
details. It was soon certain we were within a cable's length of
perpendicular cliffs of several hundred feet in height, into whose
caverns the sea poured at times, producing those frightful, hollow
moanings, that an experienced ear can never mistake. This cliff
extended for leagues in both directions, rendering drowning nearly
inevitable to the shipwrecked mariner on that inhospitable
coast. Ahead, astern, outside of us, and I might almost say all around
us, became visible, one after another, detached ledges, breakers and
ripples; so many proofs of the manner in which Providence had guided
us through the hours of darkness.
By the time the sun appeared, for, happily, the day proved bright and
clear, we had obtained pretty tolerable notions of the critical
situation in which we were placed by means of the captain's theory of
currents. The very cape that we were to drift past, lay some ten
leagues nearly dead to windward, as the breeze then was; while to
leeward, far as the eye could reach, stretched the same inhospitable,
barrier of rock as that which lay on our starboard quarter and beam.
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