unbroken pulse, drifted swiftly down on the black rock of Cape Alarm.
The rock was of so hard a type of formation that the cliffs were almost
vertical, and even exposed as they were to the eternal onslaught of this
mad sea, they had weathered very little. They still retained the sharp
vertical edges and the glossy polished planes of cleanly fractured
faults.
The sea ran in and hit the cliff without any check.
The impact seemed to jar the very air, like the concussion of bursting
high explosive, and the sea shot high in a white fury against the
unyielding rock of the cliff, before rolling back and forming a reverse
swell.
it was these returning echoes from the cliff that held Golden Adventurer
off the cliff. The shore was so steep-to that it dropped to forty
fathoms directly below the cliffs.
There was no bottom on which the ship could gut herself.
The wind was blanketed by the cliff and in the eerie stillness of air,
she drifted in closer and closer, rolling almost to her limits as the
swells took her broadside. Once she actually touched the rock with her
superstructure on one of those rolls, but then the echo-wave nudged her
away. The next wave pushed her closer, and its smaller weaker offspring
pushed back at her. A man could have jumped from a ledge on the cliff
on to her deck as she drifted slowly, parallel to the rock.
The cliff ended in an abrupt and vertical headland, where it had calved
into three tall pillars of serpentine, as graceful as the sculptured
columns of a temple of Olympian Zeus.
Again, 'den Adventurer touched one of those pillars, she bumped it
lightly with her stern. It scraped paint from her side and crushed in
her rail, but then she was past.
The light bump was just sufficient to push her stern round, and she
pointed her bows directly into the wide shallow bay beyond the cliffs.
Here a softer, more malleable rock-formation had been eroded by the
weather, forming a wide beach of purpleblack pebbles, each the size of a
man's head and water worn as round as cannon balls.
Each time the waves rushed up this stony beach, the pebbles struck
against each other with a rattling roar, and the brash of roitten and
mushy sea ice that filled the bay susurrated and clinked, as it rose and
fell with the sea.
Now Golden Adventurer was clear of the cliff, she was more fully in the
grip of the wind. Although the wind was dying, it still had force
enough to move her steadily deeper into the bay, her bows pointed
directly at the beach.
Unlike the cliff shore, the bay sloped up gently to the beach and this
allowed the big waves to build up into rounded sliding humps.
They did not curl and break into white water because the thick layer of
brash ice weighted and flattened them, so that these swells joined with
the wind to throw the ship at the beach with smoothly gathering impetus.
She took the ground with a great metallic groan of her straining plates
and canted over slowly, but the moving pebble beach moulded itself
quickly to her hull I giving gradually, as the waves and wind thrust her
