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| Suddenly a rising sea lifted the boat and cast it against the steel side of the ship where it smashed like an eggshell. The men and women in it were flung into the seething waters, and timbers were whipped away, as though they had never existed. |
| For a second De Brissac glimpsed a passenger far below him, wide eyed and terrified with his arms flung upward struggling in the spray lashed foam, then as another giant mass of water rose, the little figure disappeared. Jean staggered back clutching frantically at the deck house rail behind him. |
| Numb, cold, drenched, he clung there until the sea had subsided then staggered through the narrow alleyway between the deck houses to the port side of the ship. Vaguely his mind was still revolving about the project of getting himself a raft, but no one on a raft could hope to live five minutes in such a tempest. Next moment he stumbled into Juhani Luvia, who was superintending the embarcation of the company scheduled to go off in the port aft boat. |
| Suddenly a huge sea lifted it and cast it up against the steel side of the ship before it could get away. It was smashed like an eggshell—splintered into bits. The men and women in it were flung into the seething waters and its shattered timbers were whipped away up the slopes of those mountains of blackness that rose on every side. |
| For a second, as the sea receded, De Brissac glimpsed a white face on its surface, and two arms lifted in mute appeal, then he was blinded by the flying, dust-like froth. When he could look again no trace of the boat or its occupants was there below him in the spate to show that he had not dreamed that swift fatality. He staggered back, clutching frantically at the deck-house rail behind him. |
| Numb, cold, soaked to the skin, he hung there waiting for the seas next subsidence; when it came he staggered through a narrow alleyway between the two deck houses to the portside of the ship. |
| Vaguely his mind was still revolving about the project of getting himself a raft. He would have done so without hesitation had he been north of the equator where the most important trade routes in the world are constantly traversed by quantities of shipping, but here, in the great wastes of the South Atlantic, it seemed certain that even if he could survive these tremendous seas he would die of thirst and starvation, alone upon a raft, long before there could be any reasonable hope of his being picked up. |
| Next moment he stumbled into the Third Officer, who was superintending the swinging out of the port boat aft and the party scheduled to go off in it.
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