No one, however hopeless, but wishes, if shipwreck be inevitable, to
meet it in the open air. When so near death, a ceiling above one's head
seems like the first outline of a coffin.

They were now in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its
constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the
boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were
unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and the
Caskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, and
the uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms. The sea
suffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable. That channel
is a thing to fear.

The _Matutina_ was in it.

Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the Champs
Elysées, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment a
reef. Such is the western approach of Aurigny. The sea covers and
conceals this ship-wrecking apparatus. On this conglomeration of
submarine breakers the cloven waves leap and foam--in calm weather, a
chopping sea; in storms, a chaos.

The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavouring
to explain it to themselves. Suddenly they understood it. A pale vista
broadened in the zenith; a wan tinge overspread the sea; the livid light
revealed on the port side a long shoal stretching eastward, towards
which the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel. The shoal
was Aurigny.

What was that shoal? They shuddered. They would have shuddered even more