weather. It is a catastrophe, a defeat. To be "run ashore" has
the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error.



XXI.



That is why your "strandings" are for the most part so unexpected.
In fact, they are all unexpected, except those heralded by some
short glimpse of the danger, full of agitation and excitement, like
an awakening from a dream of incredible folly.

The land suddenly at night looms up right over your bows, or
perhaps the cry of "Broken water ahead!" is raised, and some long
mistake, some complicated edifice of self-delusion, over-
confidence, and wrong reasoning is brought down in a fatal shock,
and the heart-searing experience of your ship's keel scraping and
scrunching over, say, a coral reef. It is a sound, for its size,
far more terrific to your soul than that of a world coming
violently to an end. But out of that chaos your belief in your own
prudence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask yourself, Where on
earth did I get to? How on earth did I get there? with a
conviction that it could not be your own act, that there has been
at work some mysterious conspiracy of accident; that the charts are
all wrong, and if the charts are not wrong, that land and sea have
changed their places; that your misfortune shall for ever remain
inexplicable, since you have lived always with the sense of your
trust, the last thing on closing your eyes, the first on opening