Uncharted Seas Read Online Free PDF Page B

fall stern first towards the water.
    Carried on the terrific wind which roared over them at a hundred miles an hour, they clearly heard the shrieks and imprecations of the wretched people who had been pitched out into the boiling sea.
    With swift presence of mind some sailor, who had retained a precarious hold on the other boat, hacked through the bow falls with his knife. It flopped into the water sending up a great sheet of spray.
    Luvia’s men were endeavouring to keep their boat steady and give it way. They were already fifty yards from the
Gafelborg
, although they could only dip their oars on alternate sides at one time owing to the constantly changing slope of the dark swell.
    Rockets were still sailing upward and detonating with loud reports above the ship. Game to the last, the Swedish Captain was firing his whole stock before going over the side to take command of his own cutter.
    ‘
Dios! Dios
!’ cried Vicente Vedras, burying his head in his hand. He had seen the other boat, in which he should have been, now under-manned through its mishap in launching, picked up on a wave-crest and capsized. In the constantly shifting reflections from the ports they could see it floating upside down with one little figure clinging to it before it was swept away into the darkness.
    The blaring of the siren ceased; a last rocket flung out its coloured stars in a graceful curve high overhead; the blue flashes from the signal lamp in the rigging suddenly stopped. The Captain and those remaining on the
Gafelborg
were now taking their lives in their hands as they attempted to get away in the forward boat to starboard. The little company in Luvia’s boat, who were watching, could not see if the attempt was successful because they were on the far side of the ship.
    ‘I’ll never see daylight again,’ thought Unity Carden, ‘never live to ride another horse. It’s no good fooling myself any more. We’ll be swamped inside ten minutes; the boat will sink and we’ll all be struggling in the sea. God! how I wish I’d let George make love to me when he wanted to so badly. Now I’ll die without ever having known what love is like.’
    Basil’s mouth was set in a cynical grin. He was just thinking that there was not a single soul in the world who would be really hit by the news of his death, except perhaps Barbara, now a big noise in Hollywood. She might even sling back a few extra cocktails because she wouldn’t care to think of the young man she’d loved for a brief season floating bloated and swollen a few feet below the surface of the ocean with the fishes nibbling at his eyes.
    As they drifted and paddled farther from the abandoned ship they left the shelter she had temporarily given them. Fierce drifts of spray, stinging as April sleet in the Highlands of Scotland, beat in their faces. The boat slid up a watery mountain until its occupants felt that it would take off like a seaplane and zoom up into the dark heaven. For a second it hovered, poised in the tempestuous breaking waters on the summit, then slithered down a natural watershoot to unseen depths.
    Carried skyward once again to a mighty crest, they could see a score of other white-topped peaks separated by awful gulfs and the
Gafelborg
a hundred feet below, heaving slowly in a watery valley. They were high above her mastheads and still rising. The lights from her line of ports amidships showed by their slant that she was heavily down by the bow. A great sea broke over her, the wash gleaming dully with phosphorescent light. There was no sign of the Captain’s boat; nothing but the derelict ship was visible except for patches of angry foam on the surface of the storm-tossed waters.
    Suddenly Luvia’s boat began to rush down the precipitous farther side of the mountainous wave that had caught them up.As though catapulted forward by the unleashed force of a ten thousand horse-power engine, they were carried headlong into the black void. When they rose again on the ridge