Angel Island | Page 2

a good many faces
besides hers, the - "
"I don't seem to remember anything definite about it," Billy Fairfax
said. It was strange to hear that beating pulse of horror in Billy's mild
tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face. "I had the
same feeling that I've had in nightmares lots of times - that it was
horrible - and - I didn't think I could stand it another moment - but - of
course it would soon end - like all nightmares and I'd wake up."
Without reason, they fell again into silence.
They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the
sea spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into
a little terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first
inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives,
exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started
with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences
beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as
though mentally they slavered. But every phrase, however confused
and inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful
buffeting and their terrific final struggle. And every clause, whether
sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their
pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be. All this
was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the incessant
explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end

to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat
their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in
the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous,
semi-tropical coast.
Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.
With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated
and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually
grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister
attacks of dumbness.
"I remember wondering," Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly,
"what would become of the ship's cat."
This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their
comments. Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a
dozen times. And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a
clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began
anywhere and ended nowhere.
But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly an
atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and
the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the
others had begun to bore and irritate.
There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and
readjusting silence.
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip,
had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone
showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,
were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that
was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another on
another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested,
involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they
crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.
Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly

palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged
reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.
Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live creature,
breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated a little more
shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant, then with the
courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying, reared and sprang
at the rock again.
Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage. Here
and there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into
crazy attitudes. Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the
water-line. Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a
ceaseless, grotesque frolic with the foamy waters. Out of a mass of
wood caught between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a
woman's head, livid, rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes
straight at their group. Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in
stiff, salt-clogged masses that beat wildly about her face. Beyond
something rocking between two wedged sea-chests, but concealed by
them, constantly kicked a sodden foot into the air. Straight ahead, the
naked body of a child flashed to the crest of each wave.
All this destruction ran from north to south between two reefs of black
rock. It edged a broad bow-shaped expanse of