But that lasted only for a
moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It
jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds.
Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind
was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the
seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind
to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom
of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability.
They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at
the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man
had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is
all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more
than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts,
explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They
jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and
collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of,
that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
anarchy.
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