The shoreward side of her upper
works had, for some freakish reason, given away first, so now the
interior of her staterooms and saloons was exposed to view as in the
cross-section of a model ship. Over her, too, the great waves
hurled themselves, each carrying away its spoil. To Carroll it
seemed fantastically as though the barge were made of sugar, and
that each sea melted her precisely as Bobby loved to melt the lump
in his chocolate by raising and lowering it in a spoon.
And the queer part of it all was that these waves, so mighty in
their effects, appeared to the woman no different from those she had
often watched in the light summer blows that for a few hours raise
the "white caps" on the lake. They came in from the open in the
same swift yet deliberate ranks; they gathered with the same
leisurely pauses; they broke with the same rush and roar. They
seemed no larger, but everything else had been struck small--the
tiny ships, the toy piers, the ant-like swarm of people on the
shore. She looked on it as a spectacle. It had as yet no human
significance.
"Poor fellows!" cried Mina.
"What?" asked Carroll.
"Don't you see them?" queried the other.
Carroll looked, and in the rigging of the schooner she made out a
number of black objects.
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