"Did you?" murmured Jukes to himself.

"Wind fell all at once," went on the Captain.

Jukes burst out: "If you think it was an easy job--"

But his captain, clinging to the rail, paid no attention. "According to
the books the worst is not over yet."

"If most of them hadn't been half dead with seasickness and fright, not
one of us would have come out of that 'tween-deck alive," said Jukes.

"Had to do what's fair by them," mumbled MacWhirr, stolidly. "You don't
find everything in books."

"Why, I believe they would have risen on us if I hadn't ordered the
hands out of that pretty quick," continued Jukes with warmth.

After the whisper of their shouts, their ordinary tones, so distinct,
rang out very loud to their ears in the amazing stillness of the air. It
seemed to them they were talking in a dark and echoing vault.

Through a jagged aperture in the dome of clouds the light of a few stars
fell upon the black sea, rising and falling confusedly. Sometimes the
head of a watery cone would topple on board and mingle with the rolling
flurry of foam on the swamped deck; and the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily at
the bottom of a circular cistern of clouds. This ring of dense vapours,
gyrating madly round the calm of the centre, encompassed the ship like
a motionless and unbroken wall of an aspect inconceivably sinister.