Uncharted Seas Read Online Free PDF

tholes.
    Suddenly a swell carried the boat up until it was almost level with the ship’s deck. It rocked violently, and, as without warning the sea sank again, almost turned over.
    Several of the standing men stumbled; a stoker tripped over the after thwart, lost his grip on an oar he had been holding, and fell against the officer. The Swede staggered uncertainly,clutched wildly at the empty air, and, with a piercing cry, pitched backwards overboard.
    At the same second the oar came crashing down among the forward passengers of the boat. Its blade caught De Brissac on the head before he could twist aside. A thousand stars circled and vibrated before his eyes, a suffocating blackness smothered him, and he slid down like a pole-axed ox between the struggling seamen.
    Juhani Luvia flung himself half out of the boat in an attempt to grasp the officer, but the Swede was swept past out of his reach and whirled away to death in the raging, foam-flecked torrent.
    While Luvia was making his futile attempt at rescue, the sailors had begun to ply their oars; three to starboard, two to port. Colonel Carden grasped the tiller and turned the boat’s nose away from the ship’s side.
    De Brissac was hauled to his feet, but he hung as a sack between those who held him, and blood trickled down his face—he was dead or unconscious. Luvia ordered the lifeless body to be passed along to the stern sheets and laid out there on the bottom boards. He followed it aft, plunging recklessly over the bent backs of the oarsmen. Now that the Third Officer was dead it fell to him, although an engineer, to take command of the boat. With a nod he relieved the Colonel of the tiller and sat down between him and Basil Sutherland.
    Basil knew that he ought to be very, very drunk indeed. Convinced that there was not a shadow of a hope that any of them could live, once they were ordered to take to the boats in what seemed to be the very centre of the cyclone, he had snatched up a bottle of brandy and emptied its remaining contents down his throat before leaving the lounge. He was still gasping from the effects of the fiery liquor which burned in his chest and threatened him with the agonising pains of the most acute indigestion, but he was not drunk. Far from it, the stress of the crisis seemed instantly to have dissipated the fumes of the alcohol, or made his brain impervious to them. His senses had quickened so that he seemed to be reeling, seeing, and hearing every phase of the drama that was being played out around him, with abnormal clarity.
    He found himself contemplating his own fate with astonishing detachment. Long since, he had ceased to have any illusions about his personal importance in the scheme of things. He was a failure, that’s all there was to it; although perhaps deep down he had always had a vague idea that somehow, somewhere, sometime, anopportunity would be given to play a better role than that of an unwanted waster. He’d often regretted not having gone on the Everest trip when he’d had the chance. Expert mountaineers had considered his climbing showed exceptional promise as a young man, but more facile excitement had kept him at home. It was too late now to recall lost opportunities, and they would come no more. He was still only twenty-six, but life was ending—ending—the sands were running out while he sat there silent and acquiescent in the crowded boat.
    The sky was black as ink; not a cloud’s edge silvered by moonlight nor the pinprick of a star broke the universal canopy of darkness above them. The only lights came from the
Gafelborg;
a line of yellow moons amidships, a few more about the bridge and the abandoned lounge, the navigation lights in the rigging and a brilliant flare that someone was holding on the after-deck.
    Forward, on the side of the ship nearest to them, the other port boat was now being manned. Dark figures silhouetted for seconds only in the glare of torches moved swiftly about it. Suddenly it seemed to