just make out a dark and mountainous shape beginning to hump up above
the southern horizon like an impatient monster. He stared at it with
awful fascination, until mercifully the night hid Lorna's dreadful face.
The wind chopped the Gulf Stream up into quick confused seas, and it did
not blow steadily, but flogged them with squally gusts and rain that
crackled against the bridge windows with startling suddenness.
The night was utterly black, there were no stars, no source of light
whatsoever, and Warlock lurched and heeled to the pattemless seas.
Barometer's rising sharply/ David Allen called suddenly. It's jumped
three millibars - back to 100 S. The trough/said Nicholas grimly. It
was a classic hurricane formation, that narrow girdle of higher pressure
that demarcated the outer fringe of the great revolving spiral of
tormented air. We are going into it now. And as he spoke the darkness
lifted, the heavens began to burn like a bed of hot coals, and the sea
shone with a sullen ruddy luminosity as though the doors of a furnace
had been thrown wide.
Nobody spoke on Warlock's bridge, they lifted their faces with the same
awed expressions as worshippers in a lofty cathedral and they looked up
at the skies.
Low cloud raced above them, cloud that glowed and shone with that
terrible ominous flare, Slowly the light faded and changed, turning a
paler sickly greenish hue, like the shine on putrid meat. Nicholas
spoke first.
The Devil's Beacon/he said, and he wanted to rationalize it to break the
superstitious mood that gripped them all. It was merely the rays of the
sun below the western horizon catching the cloud peaks of the storm and
reflected downwards through the weak cloud cover of the trough but
somehow he could not find the right words to denigrate that phenomenon
that was part of the mariner's lore, the malignant beacon that leads a
doomed ship on to its fate.
The weird light faded slowly away leaving the night even darker and more
foreboding than it had been before David/ Nicholas thought quickly of
something to distract his officers, have we got a radar contact yet? and
the new Mate roused himself with a visible effort and crossed to the
radarscope.
The range is very confused/ he said, his voice still subdued, and
Nicholas joined him at the screen.
The sweeping arm lit a swirling mass of sea clutter, and the strange
ghost echoes thrown up by electrical discharges within the approaching
storm. The outline of the Florida mainland and of the nearest islands
of the Grand Bahamas bank were firm and immediately recognizable. They
reminded Nicholas yet again of how little sea-room there was in which to
manoeuver his tugs and their monstrous prize.
Then, in the trash of false echo and sea clutter, his trained eye picked
out a harder echo on the extreme limits of the set's range. He watched
it carefully for half a dozen revolutions of the radar's sweep, and each
time it was constant and clearer.
Radar contact, he said. Tell Golden Dawn we are in contact, range
sixty-five nautical miles. Tell them we will take on tow before
