Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II The "nantwich" : Loose Death—who on land in peace-time steals about silent and modest, like a murderer among decent people—enjoys at sea his true, shameless character, with elbowroom and playtime. Here on the waters in darkness, the young men saw and felt his magnitude, heard him roaring at them, and roaring again, dealing shock after shock, and filling with his eternal voice the frame and vault of things. Death caroused at home, where the intrusion of Life, in their persons, meant no more than if two ants were creeping on the floor of a drunken giant's hall. They felt this, vividly at first, then dimly, for thought departed from them, left but a residue of sensation, or came and went like the rope which—as they were lashing the wheel—now wrapped and fouled their legs, now washed away into oblivion. "The rigging!" they cried. "Up to it!" How they gained the starboard ratlines, through that sudden, howling night, neither man could recall; but each remembered their crucifixion aloft, the sluice of cold rain, their gyration with the mainmast in giddy rise and tumble and butt-end blow, as if they were bound to a pile driver without guides. They heard many noises, but all were tones of that world-wide voice roaring. They saw one sight, gusty upheavals of smoke whiter than marble dust, below, that silently rose at them through the black net of the rain, drove past, and vanished. These must have been waves. Like the staysail, time itself blew away. The men measured it by aches and pains, by the recurring need to shift their bodies, to unhook and re- hook an arm when the biceps, pinched by a ratline, gave out. Once, another lull or "hole" breaking the rain, they saw a kind of muddy, final daylight. The sea wallowed in black edges that ripped into spray, and a ...