Quickly she got into her stride. On the port bow the island of Borkum was beginning to loom up just distinguishable through the driving scud. The wireless was talking with it. Borkum reported with steady regularity: "No enemy in sight." The cruiser hurried down the eastern branch of the Ems, meeting a heavy swell that rolled darkly towards her to be divided into two thin translucent curtains of water poised like wings on either side of her bows. The shoals to port and starboard glimmered away into the distance, wide stretches of running, leaping, jostling white-caps. The water under their lee showed an ugly, dirty yellow that contrasted with the black waves of the channel. On the bridge the navigating lieutenant still peered anxiously into the veiled horizon. Every now and then he glanced back at the welter of black smoke issuing from their funnels and muttered fluent curses that were the perverted expression of the prayer in his heart. Behind him stood the captain and the commander, conversing in the intervals of raising their binoculars to their eyes. At every minute a message from the wireless room was brought to the captain. Borkum was still talking. Suddenly the tenor of its messages changed. "Two British cruisers passing the minefield in the Western Ems." A moment later Emden reported three submarines at the fork of the channel behind. The captain smiled grimly. He could not now go back, but apparently he had given his warders the slip. He went to the engine-room telephone and spoke a few words to the chief. In answer the masses of black smoke from the funnels rolled out even more densely than before. The curtains of flying water at the bows rose a little higher and remained at the elevation. Borkum announced: "Mines evidently swept or damaged--cruisers untouched." In fact, in slight lulls of the gale, slow dull booms were audible to leeward. The batteries on the island were firing. The captain turned and laughed with the commander. The situation could not be more favourable. They had as good as escaped. A few long minutes and they had reached the open sea. Borkum was a grey blur on their port quarter, the land to the east of them passed into invisibility. Here they felt the full force of the gale. The cruiser nosed into great waves that leaped green above the bows and fell with a heavy thud upon the deck. She endeavoured to combine a steady roll with violent pitching, and the officers on the bridge clutched at the rail with one hand while with the other they pressed their glasses hard against their eyes. The veils of driving mist which swept continuously across the waters might hide a menace that would loom up at any instant as destruction. Suddenly a telephone bell rang in the wheelhouse behind them. A man ran out, saluted and reported: "Submarine right ahead--about 1000 metres."